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3i5p tty ^ame #utl)or 



A Study of Prose Fiction 

The Powers at Play 

The Plated City 

Salem Kittredge and Other Stories 

The Broughton House 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 



The Amateur Spirit 



By Bliss Perry 




Boston and New York 

Houghton, Mifflin and Company 

@tf)t ftita^i&e $re&&, Camuribge 

1904 



* 30«?Q*?ESS 
Two Pontes ^er««ved 
7 10 1904 

^ooyrfsrht £mrv 
GLASS (^ XXo. No. 
' COPY B 



•7* /I? 



COPYRIGHT 1904 BY BLISS PERRY 



Published October IQ04 



To 
A. B. P. 



PKEFACE 

The half dozen essays that are printed in this 
volume have sufficient unity, I hope, to justify 
their publication as a book. The emotions of the 
author who discovers that he has produced a 
treatise when he intended only a series of essays 
may be likened to the surprise of the child who 
observes that his blocks, piled almost at random, 
make something that looks like a castle after all. 
My castle is indeed but a modest one. Yet the 
essays which make up this volume have all been 
written, I find, with some reference to the cen- 
tral theme : namely, the significance of the ama- 
teur spirit in carrying forward the daily work of 
our modern world. I have endeavored to illus- 
trate from many fields — from sports and poli- 
tics, from science and letters — the possibility of 
combining the professional's skill with the zest 
and enthusiasm of the amateur. 

The first essay is devoted to that general 
theme. The study of Indifferentism approaches 



viii PREFACE 

the subject from another side, and one not less 
fascinating to the observer of human life. The 
two papers about the College Professor have 
been chosen, partly because that profession is 
but little understood by the general public, and 
partly because it frequently affords a very per- 
fect illustration of the union of an ardent human 
spirit with a consummate technical expertness. 
The story of an episode in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 
spiritual development contributes something, I 
think, to the understanding of the fusion of 
normal human interests and sympathies with the 
purely artistic passion of the born writer. The 
amateur and the professional in Hawthorne — 
using both words in their best sense — may be 
observed with singular clearness in that critical 
summer of 1838. 

An honored and friendly Doctor of Divinity 
has accused me of endeavoring, in the essay upon 
Fishing with a Worm, to write allegory. That 
shall be as the reader chooses to interpret it ; but 
I have certainly tried to picture from the material 
offered by a favorite pastime, some of the warring 
motives in the old struggle between the generous 
and the sordid ways of looking at the world. 



PREFACE ix 

I should add that the essay on The Life of a 
College Professor originally appeared in Scrib- 
ner's Magazine. The others have been printed 
in The Atlantic Monthly. 

B. P. 

Cambbidge, 1904. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Amateur Spirit 1 

Indifferentism ...... 35 

The Life of a College Professor ... 67 

College Professors and the Public . . 93 

Hawthorne at North Adams .... 117 

Fishing with a Worm . . * . . 141 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

One interesting result of the British struggle 
in South Africa was a revival among English- 
men of the spirit of self-examination. The unex- 
pected duration and the staggering cost of the 
war brought sharply home to them a realization 
of national shortcomings. When every allowance 
was made for the natural difficulties against which 
the British troops so gallantly contended, there 
remained a good deal of incontrovertible and un- 
welcome evidence of defective preparation, of in- 
adequate training. The War Office maps were 
incomplete ; the Boer positions were ill reconnoi- 
tred; British officers of long experience were 
again and again outgeneraled by farmers. Of the 
many frank and manly endeavors to analyze the 
causes of such a surprising weakness, one of 
the most suggestive was made by the Hon. George 
C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton College. In an 
article published in 1900 he inquired whether his 
countrymen may well be called, not, as formerly, 



4 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

" a nation of shopkeepers," but, with more justice, 
a nation of amateurs. " Conspicuous as are the 
virtues of British soldiers and British officers," 
he remarks, " these virtues are essentially the vir- 
tues of the amateur, and not of the professional, 
arising from the native vigor of our national tem- 
perament, and not from intelligent education or 
training." 1 

The distinction here made between the ama- 
teur and the professional is one that, for ordi- 
nary purposes, is obvious enough. The amateur, 
we are accustomed to say, works for love, and 
not for money. He cultivates an art or a sport, 
a study or an employment, because of his taste 
for it ; he is attached to it, not because it gives 
him a living, but because it ministers to his life. 
Mr. Joseph Jefferson, for instance, is classed as 
a professional actor and an amateur painter. 
Charles Dickens was an amateur actor and a 
professional novelist. Your intermittent polit- 
ical reformer is an amateur. His opponent, the 
"ward man," is a professional; politics being 
both his life and his living, his art and his con- 
stant industry. 

1 The Nineteenth Century, October, 1900. 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 5 

In any particular art or sport, it is often diffi- 
cult to draw a hard-and-fast line between amateur 
and professional activity. The amateur athlete 
may be so wholly in earnest as to take risks and 
to endure hardships which no amount of money 
would tempt him to undergo. This earnestness 
has seldom, if ever, been carried so far as it is in 
our American athletic contests of the present day. 
Here, for instance, is the testimony of one of 
the members of the Oxford- Cambridge Golfing 
Society's team, which won so many victories on 
the American links in the summer of 1903 : 

"Apart from the American phraseology and 
such minor distinctions, golf as played across 
the Atlantic is fundamentally different from the 
English, and more especially the Scotch variety 
of the game. At bottom the game in America is 
a business. At bottom the game in England 
is a pleasure, a relaxation, and a means of 
taking pleasant exercise. No doubt from its en- 
thralling nature golf in England has devotees to 
whom the game is a ' pleasure that 's all but pain,' 
but even so, the attitude of this minority is dif- 
ferent from the great bulk of American players 
who have set golf upon such a pedestal that it 



6 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

has dominated them as a c pain that is almost a 
pleasure.' . . . 

" The whole attitude towards golf is one of 
comparison, just as in other branches of life. 
The American is intensely interested in the tall- 
est building, the richest man, the longest street, 
the fastest train, and a host of other such combi- 
nations which sound like exercises out of an ele- 
mentary German grammar. It is imagined that 
there is a list, at the head of which is the best 
player, with the rest below him in descending 
scale of efficiency. . . . 

" The title of champion does not carry with it 
honor and congratulation, but rather liability to 
attack and disparagement if the holder does not 
win every single match or competition in which 
he plays. This criticism may be important from 
the business point of view of the professional, as 
an advertisement, but it cannot possibly affect an 
amateur who has nothing whatever to gain or lose 
pecuniarily by being champion. The principle is 
to put a man at the head of a list and then tear 
him down by all available means. . . . This con- 
tinual golf -playing with an object does away with 
the light-hearted and cheery matches and four- 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 7 

somes which are the main part of golf in the 
United Kingdom. The game under this treatment 
easily loses its title to be called a game, and be- 
comes a serious proposition, blighted with respon- 
sibilities and overburdened with care. There is 
no relaxation in golf of this kind, but only in- 
creased consumption of both physical and mental 
energy." 1 

And here is a Harvard rowing-man writing 
with admirable frankness in a recent number of 
The Harvard Graduated Magazine, under the 
title " Sport or Business " : "I have known but 
one 'Varsity athlete (I refer particularly to foot- 
ball and rowing as the most strenuous branches 
of our sport) who admitted for a moment that 
he went out for the fun he got from the practice 
and the contest. . . . 

" As the thing now stands a man may have the 
best of personal reasons for not playing, but if 
he is a good athlete his duty to the college de- 
mands a sacrifice of these. The duty to get Yale 
beaten is just now reckoned to be the athlete's sole 
duty, while his duty to his present and future self 
looms small in the background, or vaguely in the 

1 J. A. T. Bramston in Golf, 



8 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

middle distance. It is hard lines for men who are 
unable to adapt themselves to such a perspective, 
and who are made to feel ashamed of this as of a 
weakness. They bear indeed the 4 athlete's bur- 
den.' And there are too many such men, — men 
who thoroughly dislike their work under the pre- 
sent extreme conditions, moral as well as physical, 
and who do it only from a vague feeling that it is 
4 up to them ' to stake their persons in the gen- 
eral obligation to organize victory. 

" The spirit that makes a man, when he has once 
undertaken a thing, put it through to a finish and 
win out no matter what it costs (and this was 
once given as a definition of the Yale spirit), is 
an excellent maxim for business or politics, and 
one that is frequently heard in defense of the 
present teeth-gritting state of affairs between 
Harvard and Yale. But such a maxim cannot be 
applied to athletics. It means the death of ath- 
letics. Its place is in the prize-ring or anywhere 
you please save in a branch of activity which is 
essentially a recreation. The true amateur ath- 
lete, the true sportsman, is one who takes up sport 
for the fun of it and the love of it, and to whom 
success or defeat is a secondary matter so long as 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 9 

the play is good. . . • Rivalry is a vital element of 
sport ; it is from doing the thing well, doing the 
thing handsomely, doing the thing intelligently 
that one derives the pleasure which is the essence 
of sport. Even more vital than the rivalry itself 
is the checking of its fierceness and bitterness by 
the graciousness of gentlemanly feeling. It must 
be remembered that pure rivalry is fighting, and 
the more its part is magnified in sport the more 
sport takes on the nature of a fight, — the nature 
of the sport which has come to exist between 
Harvard and Yale. We have to admit that there 
are some of us who prefer fighting-fun to sport, 
and there is no doubt that the fighting is a healthy 
discipline ; but the majority of us do not, and 
there is no reason why our athletics should be 
moulded to suit the taste of the former, — that 
we should be made to take our fun with all these 
convulsions and hysterics. Yet just as long as we 
meet the present-day Yale such will be the state 
of things. . . . 

" I am well aware of the construction which 
a part of the public would put upon Harvard's 
giving up contests with Yale. ' Hopeless of vic- 
tory,' it would be repeated, ' and like a sulky 



10 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

child, she won't play ! ' To make my own mean- 
ing clear let me repeat that not the loss of vic- 
tories, but fear of the loss of the true amateur 
spirit here would be what would urge Harvard to 
such a course. I have rowed against Yale three 
times, twice in minor crews which beat her, and 
once in a university boat which she beat hand- 
somely. I should be willing to see her beat Har- 
vard incessantly if the business and hysterical 
elements of the thing could be left out. And for 
these elements it is by no means fair to blame 
Yale exclusively, though her ' spirit ' is popularly 
understood to include them. The contestants if 
left to themselves would not develop this spirit 
to such excess. It comes from outside pressure, 
from the papers, the graduates, the non-athletic 
undergraduates, the crowd of betting toughs who 
turn up at every important game, and, in general, 
the false ' friends of sport.' " 1 

The athletic contests of zealous undergraduates 
are of course but one illustration of the earnest- 
ness which the amateur may carry into every 
department of life. Amateur philanthropy, for 

1 William James, Jr., in The Harvard Graduates 1 Magazine, 
December, 1903. 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 11 

example, is of great and increasing service in 
the social organism of the modern community. 
Many an American brings to his amusement, his 
avocation, — such as yachting, fancy farming, 
tarpon fishing, — the same thoroughness, energy, 
and practical skill that win him success in his 
vocation. 

And yet, as a general rule, the amateur betrays 
amateurish qualities. He is unskillful because un- 
trained ; desultory because incessant devotion to 
his hobby is both unnecessary and wearisome; 
ineffective because, after all, it is not a vital 
matter whether he succeed or fail. The amateur 
actor is usually interesting, at times delightful, 
and even, as in the case of Dickens, powerful ; his 
performance gives pleasure to his friends; but, 
nevertheless, the professional, who must act well 
or starve, acts very much better. In a country 
where there is a great leisure class, as the Warden 
of Merton points out, amateurism is sure to flour- 
ish. " The young Englishman of this great leisure 
class," he says, " is no dandy and no coward, but 
he is an amateur born and bred, with an amateur's 
lack of training, an amateur's contempt of method, 
and an amateur's ideal of life." The English boy 



12 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

attends school, he adds, with other boys who are 
amateurs in their studies, and almost professionals 
in their games ; he passes through the university 
with the minimum of industry ; he finds profes- 
sional and public life in Great Britain crippled 
by the amateur spirit ; in the army, the bar, the 
church, in agriculture, manufacturing, and com- 
merce, there is a contempt for knowledge, an in- 
veterate faith in the superiority of the rule of 
thumb, a tendency to hold one's self a little above 
one's work. 

Similar testimony has also been given by Man- 
dell Creighton, the late Bishop of London, in a 
posthumously published address entitled " A Plea 
for Knowledge." " The great defect of England 
at present," confesses the bishop, " is an inade- 
quate conception of the value of knowledge in 
itself, and of its importance for the national life. 
We have a tendency to repose on our laurels ; to 
adopt the attitude that we are no longer profes- 
sionals, but high-minded and eclectic amateurs. 
. . . We do not care to sacrifice our dignity by 
taking undue care about trifles." 1 

With the validity of such indictments against 

1 Contemporary Review, April, 1901. 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 13 

a whole nation we Lave no direct concern. But 
they suggest the importance of the distinction be- 
tween the amateur and the professional spirit. 
They show that a realization of this distinction 
may affect many phases of activity, personal and 
national. They indicate how far reaching may 
be its significance for us Americans as we face 
those new conditions under which the problems 
of both personal and national life must be worked 
out. 

Amateurs, then, to borrow Mr. Brodrick's 
definition, "are men who are not braced up to 
a high standard of effort and proficiency by a 
knowledge that failure may involve ruin, who sel- 
dom fully realize the difficulties of success against 
trained competitors, and who therefore rebel 
against the drudgery of professional drill and 
methodical instruction.' ' One may accept this 
definition, in all its implications, without ceasing 
to be aware of the charm of the amateur. For 
the amateur surely has his charm, and he has his 
virtues, — virtues that have nowhere wrought 
more happily for him than here upon American 
soil. Versatility, enthusiasm, freshness of spirit, 
initiative, a fine recklessness of tradition and 



14 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

precedent, a faculty for cutting across lots, — 
these are the qualities of the American pioneer. 
Not in the Italians of the Renaissance nor in the 
Elizabethan Englishmen will one find more plas- 
ticity of mind and hand than among the plain 
Americans of 1840. Take those men of the Tran- 
scendentalist epoch, whose individuality has been 
fortunately transmitted to us through our litera- 
ture. They were in love with life, enraptured of 
its opportunities and possibilities. No matter to 
what task a man set his hand, he could gain a live- 
lihood without loss of self-respect or the respect of 
the community. Let him try teaching school, Emer- 
son would advise ; let him farm it a while, drive 
a tin peddler's cart for a season or two, keep 
store, go to Congress, live " the experimental life." 
Emerson himself could muse upon the oversoul, 
but he also raised the best Baldwin apples and 
Bartlett pears in Concord, and got the highest 
current prices for them in the Boston market. 
His friend Thoreau supported himself by making 
sand-paper or lead pencils, by surveying farms, 
or by hoeing that immortal patch of beans ; his 
true vocation being steadily that of the philoso- 
pher, the seeker. The type has been preserved, 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 15 

by the translucent art of Hawthorne, in the 
person of Holgrave, the daguerreotypist of The 
House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave was 
twenty-two, but he had already been a school- 
master, storekeeper, editor, peddler, dentist. He 
had traveled in Europe, joined a company of 
Fourierists, and lectured on mesmerism. Yet 
" amid all these personal vicissitudes," Haw- 
thorne tells us, " he had never lost his identity. 
He had never violated the innermost man, but 
had carried his conscience along with him." 

No doubt there is something humorous, to our 
generation, in this glorification of the Yankee tin 
peddler. Yet how much there is to admire in the 
vivacity, the resourcefulness, the very mobility, 
of that type of man, who was always in light 
marching order, and who, by flank attack and 
feigned retreat and in every disguise of uniform, 
stormed his way to some sort of moral victory at 
last! And the moral victory was often accom- 
panied by material victory as well. These men 
got on, by hook or by crook; they asked no 
favors ; they paid off their mortgages, and in- 
vented machines, and wrote books, and founded 
new commonwealths. In war and peace they had 



16 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

a knack for getting things done, and learning the 
rules afterward. 

Nor has this restless, inventive, querying, ac- 
complishing type of American manhood lost its 
prominence in our political and social structure. 
The self-made man is still, perhaps, our most re- 
presentative man. Native shrewdness and energy 
and practical capacity — qualities such as the 
amateur may possess in a high degree — continue 
to carry a man very far. They have frequently 
been attended by such good fortune as to make 
it easy for us to think that they are the only 
qualities needed for success. Some of the most 
substantial gains of American diplomacy, for in- 
stance, have been made by men without diplomatic 
training. We have seen within a very few years 
an almost unknown lawyer, from an insignificant 
city, called to be the head of the Department of 
State, where his achievements, indeed, promptly 
justified his appointment. The case of Judge 
Day is by no means unique. The conduct of the 
War Department and the Navy has frequently 
been intrusted to civilians whose frank ignorance 
of their new duties has been equaled only by 
their skill in performing them. The history of 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 17 

American cabinets is, in spite of many exceptions, 
on the whole, an apotheosis of the amateur. It is 
the readiest justification of the tin peddler theory, 
— the theory, namely, that you should first get 
your man, and then let him learn his new trade by 
practicing it. " By dint of hammering one gets 
to be a blacksmith," say the French ; and if a 
blacksmith, why not a postmaster, or a postmaster- 
general, or an ambassador ? 

The difficulty with this theory lies in the temp- 
tation to exaggerate it. Because we have been 
lucky thus far, we are tempted to proceed upon 
the comfortable conviction that if we once find 
our man, the question of his previous apprentice- 
ship to his calling, or even that of his training in 
some related field of activity, may safely be ig- 
nored. The gambler is in our blood. We like to 
watch the performance of an untried man in a 
responsible position, much as we do the trotting 
of a green horse. The admitted uncertainty of the 
result enhances our pleasure in the experiment. 
In literature, just now, we are witnessing the ex- 
ploitation of the " young writer." Lack of experi- 
ence, of craftsmanship, is actually counted among 
a fledgeling author's assets. The curiosity of the 



18 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

public regarding this new, unknown power is 
counted upon to offset, and more, the recognition 
of the known power of the veteran writer. Power 
is indeed recognized as the ultimate test of merit ; 
but there is a widespread tendency to overlook 
the fact that power is largely conditioned upon 
skill, and that skill depends not merely upon nat- 
ural faculty, but upon knowledge and discipline. 
The popularity of the " young writer " is, in short, 
an illustration of the easy glorification of amateur 
qualities to the neglect of professional qualities. 

This tendency is the more curious because of 
our pronounced national distaste for ineffective- 
ness. The undisguisedly amateurish traits of 
unskillfulness and desultoriness have not been 
popular here. If we have been rather complaisant 
toward the jack-of -all-trades, we have never wholly 
forgotten that he is "master of none." In the 
older New England vernacular, the village ne'er- 
do-well was commonly spoken of as a " clever " 
fellow ; the adjective was distinctly opprobrious. 
And indeed, if the connoisseur is the one who 
knows, and the dilettante the one who only thinks 
he knows, the amateur is often the one who would 
like to know, but is too lazy to learn. Accord- 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 19 

ingly, lie keeps guessing, in an easy, careless, 
" clever " fashion, which is agreeable enough when 
no serious interests are at stake. He has transient 
affections for this and that department of thought 
or activity ; like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, he 
has " gone into that a good deal at one time." Mr. 
Brooke is a delightful person in fiction, but in 
actual life a great many Mr. Brookes end their 
career at the town farm. Even this would not 
in itself be so lamentable a matter, if it were not 
in the power of a community of Mr. Brookes to 
create conditions capable of driving the rest of us 
to the town farm. " Dilettanteism, hypothesis, 
speculation, a kind of amateur search for truth, 
— this," says Carlyle, "is the sorest sin." 

The amateur search for truth has always flour- 
ished, and is likely to flourish always, in the 
United States. That the quest is inspiriting, 
amusing, sometimes highly rewarded, one may 
readily admit. But if it promotes individualism, 
it also produces the crank. If it brevets us all 
as philosophers, it likewise brands many of us as 
fools. Who does not know the amateur economist, 
with his " sacred ratios," or his amiable willing- 
ness to " do something for silver " ? The amateur 



20 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

sociologist, who grows strangely confused if you 
ask him to define Sociology ? Popular preachers, 
who can refute Darwin and elucidate Jefferson 
"while you wait," — if you do wait? Amateur 
critics of art and literature, who have plenty of 
zeal, but no knowledge of standards, no anchorage 
in principles? The lady amateur, who writes 
verses without knowing prosody, and paints pic- 
tures without learning to draw, and performs what 
she calls " social service " without training her 
own children either in manners or religion ? Nay, 
are there not amateur teachers who walk grace- 
fully through the part, but add neither to the do- 
main of human knowledge nor to the practical 
efficiency of any pupil ? 

But the roll-call of these dependents and defec- 
tives is long enough. The failures of the amateur 
search for truth are often brilliant failures. Its 
occasional successes have often been brilliant, too. 
Yet the real workaday progress, the solid irre- 
traceable advance in any art or profession, has 
commonly been made by the professional. He 
sums up in himself both connoisseurship and 
craftsmanship. He not only knows, but does. 
Pasteur was a professional, and Helmholtz, and 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 21 

Huxley. John Marshall was a professional jurist. 
Mr. John Sargent is a professional painter of por- 
traits, and Mr. Secretary Hay is a professional 
diplomatist. 

If the gifted amateur desires to learn his rela- 
tive rank when compared with a professional, the 
way is easy. Let him challenge the professional ! 
Play a match at golf against the dour Scotchman 
who gives lessons for his daily bread. He will 
beat you, because he cannot afford not to beat 
you. Shoot against your guide in the North 
Woods. You will possibly beat him at a target, 
but he will hit the deer that you have just missed ; 
you can cast a fly on the lawn much farther than 
he, but he will take more fish out of the pool. It 
is his business, your recreation. Some one dear 
to you is critically ill. It seems cruel to surrender 
the care of the sick person to a hireling, when you 
are conscious of boundless love and devotion. 
But your physician will prefer the trained nurse, 
because the trained nurse will do what she is told, 
will keep cool, keep quiet, count the drops accu- 
rately, read the thermometer right ; because, in 
short, he can depend upon a professional, and can- 
not depend upon an amateur. 



22 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

What is true of the sport, of the art, is even 
more invariably true in the field of scientific ef- 
fort. How secure is the course of the Fachmann, 
who by limiting his territory has become lord of 
it, who has a fund of positive knowledge upon all 
the knowable portions of it, and has charted, at 
least, the deepening water where knowledge sheers 
off into ignorance ! It is late in the day to con- 
fess the indebtedness of our generation to the 
scientific method. How tonic and heartening, in 
days of dull routine, has been the example of 
those brave German masters to whom our Ameri- 
can scholarship owes so much ! What industry 
has been theirs, what confidence in method, what 
serene indifference to the rivalry of the gifted, 
amateur ! I recall the fine scorn with which Bern- 
hard ten Brink, at Strassburg, used to wave aside 
the suggestions of his pupils that this or that 
new and widely advertised book might contain 
some valuable contribution to his department. 
" Nay," he would retort, " wissenschqftliche Be- 
deutung hat 9 s doch nicht" Many a pretentious 
book, a popular book, even a very useful book, 
was pilloried by that quiet sentence, " It has no 
scientific significance" To get the import of that 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 23 

sentence thoroughly into one's head is worth all 
it costs to sit at the feet of German scholars. 
There speaks the true, patient, scientific spirit, 
whose service to the modern man was perhaps 
the most highly appraised factor when we of the 
western world tried to take an inventory of our- 
selves and our indebtedness, at the dawn of the 
twentieth century. 

For to be able to assess the scientific bearing 
of the new book, the new fact, upon your own 
profession proves you a master of your profes- 
sion. Modern competitive conditions are making 
this kind of expert knowledge more and more 
essential. The success of German manufactur- 
ing chemists, for example, is universally acknow- 
ledged to be due to the scientific attainments of 
the thousands of young men who enter the manu- 
factories from the great technical schools. The 
alarm of Englishmen over the recent strides of 
Germany in commercial rivalry is due to a dawn- 
ing recognition of the efficacy of knowledge, and 
of the training which knowledge recommends. It 
is the well-grounded alarm of the gifted amateur 
when compelled to compete with the professional. 
The professional may not be a wholly agreeable 



24 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

antagonist; he may not happen to be a " club- 
able " person ; but that fact does not vitiate his 
record. His record stands. 

Is it possible to explain this patent or latent 
antagonism of the amateur toward the profes- 
sional ? It is explicable, in part at least, through 
a comparison not so much of their methods of 
work — where the praise must be awarded to the 
professional — as of their characteristic spirit. 
And here there is much more to be said for the 
amateur. The difference will naturally be more 
striking if we compare the most admirable trait 
of the amateur spirit with the least admirable 
trait of the professional spirit. 

The cultivated amateur, who touches life on 
many sides, perceives that the professional is apt 
to approach life from one side only. It is a com- 
monplace to say that without specialized training 
and accomplishment the road to most kinds of 
professional success is closed. Yet, through bend- 
ing one's energies unremittingly upon a particu- 
lar task, it often happens that creation narrows 
"in man's view," instead of widening. Your 
famous expert, as you suddenly discover, is but a 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 25 

segment of a man, — overdeveloped in one direc- 
tion, atrophied in all others. His expertness, his 
professional functioning, so to speak, is of indis- 
putable value to society, but he himself remains 
an unsocial member of the body politic. He has 
become a machine, — as Emerson declared so 
long ago, " a thinker, not a man thinking." He 
is uninterested, and consequently uninteresting. 
Very possibly it may not be the chief end of man 
to afford an interesting spectacle to the observer. 
And yet so closely are we bound together that 
a loss of sympathy, of imagination, of free and 
varied activity, soon insulates the individual, and 
lessens his usefulness as a member of society. 
Surely we are playing an interesting comedy, 
here between heaven and the mire, and we ought 
to play it in an interested way. We can afford 
to be human. Scientific Method is a handmaiden 
whose services have proved indispensable. No one 
can fill her place. We should raise her wages. 
But, after all, Personality is the mistress of the 
house. Method must be taught to know her sta- 
tion, and 

" She is the second, not the first." 

No doubt there is a temptation, in such a com- 



26 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

parison of qualities and gifts, to dally with mere 
abstractions. None of us have known a wholly 
methodized, mechanicalized man. But none the 
less we may properly endeavor to measure a ten- 
dency, and to guard against its excess. There are 
few observers of American life who believe that 
specialization has as yet been carried too far. 
Yet one may insist that the theory of specialized 
functions, necessitated as it is by modern condi- 
tions, and increasingly demanded as it must be 
while our civilization grows in complexity, needs 
examination and correction in the interests of 
true human progress. It is not that we actually 
meet on the sidewalk some scientific Franken- 
stein, some marvelously developed special faculty 
for research or invention or money-making, which 
dominates and dwarfs all other faculties, — 
though we often see something that looks very 
much like it. It is rather that thoughtful people 
are compelled to ask themselves, How far can 
this special development — this purely profes- 
sional habit of mind — proceed without injury 
to the symmetry of character, without impairing 
the varied and spontaneous and abundant play of 
human powers which gives joy to life ? And the 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 27 

prejudice which the amateur feels toward the 
professional, the more or less veiled hostility be- 
tween the man who does something for love 
which another man does for money, is one of 
those instinctive reactions — like the vague alarm 
of some wild creature in the woods — which give 
a hint of danger. 

Let us make the very fullest acknowledgment 
of our debt to the professional spirit. Many of 
our best inheritances, such as our body of law, 
represent the steady achievements of professional 
skill, professional self-sacrifice. The mechanical 
conveniences and equipments in which the age 
abounds, all this apparatus for communication 
and transportation, have been wrought out for 
us by the most patient, the most concentrated ac- 
tivity of professionals. The young man who is 
entering medicine, the law, business, the army, 
the church, finds himself ranked at once by his 
power to assimilate the professional experience of 
older men. Some day, let us trust, the young man 
who desires to serve his country in her civil ser- 
vice, her consular and diplomatic service, will find 
himself, not as now, blocked by an amateurish 
system of rewards for partisan fealty, but upon 



28 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

the road to a genuine professional career. The 
hope of society, no doubt, depends largely upon 
those men who are seriously devoting their en- 
ergies to some form of expert activity. They 
are the torch-bearers, the trained runners who 
bear the light from stage to stage of the heaven- 
beholden course. And at least in the immediate 
future the necessity for unwearying professional 
endeavor will be more pressing than ever before 
in the history of the world. 

" Cities will crowd to its edge 
In a blacker incessanter line ; 
. . . The din will be more on its banks, 
Denser the trade on its stream." 

Ours must be, not "a nation of amateurs," 
but a nation of professionals, if it is to hold its 
own in the coming struggles, — struggles not 
merely for commercial dominance, but for the 
supremacy of political and moral ideals. Our 
period of national isolation, with all it brought 
of good or evil, has been outlived. The new 
epoch will place a heavy handicap upon igno- 
rance of the actual world, upon indifference to 
international usages and undertakings, upon con- 
tempt for the foreigner. What is needed is, in- 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 29 

deed, knowledge, and the skill that knowledge 
makes possible. The spirit with which we con- 
front the national tasks of the future should have 
the sobriety, the firmness, the steady effectiveness, 
which we associate with the professional. 

Yet is it not possible, while thus acknowledg- 
ing and cultivating the professional virtues, to 
free ourselves from some of the grosser faults of 
the mere professional ? The mere professional's 
cupidity, for instance, his low aim, his time-serv- 
ing, his narrowness, his clannish loyalty to his 
own department only ? How often he lacks im- 
agination ! How indifferent he may show himself 
to the religious and moral passion, to the dreams, 
hopes, futilities, regrets of the breathing, bleed- 
ing, struggling men and women by his side ! It 
is not the prize-fighter only who brings profession- 
alism into disrepute. The jockey who "pulls" a 
horse, the oarsman who " sells " a race, the bicy- 
clist who fouls a rival, are condemned even by a 
mob of " sporting men." But the taint of profes- 
sionalism clings also to the business man who can 
think only of his shop, the scholar who talks 
merely of letters, the politician who asks of the 
proposed measure, " What is there in this for 



30 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

me ? " To counteract all such provinciality and 
selfishness, such loss of the love of honor in the 
love of gain, one may rightly plead for some 
breath of the spirit of the amateur, the amator, 
the " man who loves ; " the man who works for 
the sheer love of working, plays the great com- 
plicated absorbing game of life for the sake of 
the game, and not for his share of the gate 
money ; the man who is ashamed to win if he 
cannot win fairly, — nay, who is chivalric enough 
to grant breathing-space to a rival, whether he 
win or lose ! • 

Is it an impossible ideal, this combination of 
qualities, this union of the generous spirit of the 
amateur with the method of the professional? 
In the new world of disciplined national endeavor 
upon which we are entering, why may not the old 
American characteristics of versatility, sponta- 
neity, adventurousness, still persist? These are 
the traits that fit one to adjust himself readily to 
unforeseen conditions, to meet new emergencies. 
They will be even more valuable in the future 
than in the past, if they are employed to supple- 
ment, rather than to be substituted for, the solid 
achievements of professional industry. If we are 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 31 

really to lead the world's commerce, — though 
that is far from being the only kind of leadership 
to which American history should teach us to as- 
pire, — it will be the Yankee characteristics, plus 
the scientific training of the modern man, that 
will enable us to do it. The personal enthusiasm, 
the individual initiative, the boundless zest, of 
the American amateur must penetrate, illuminate, 
idealize, the brute force, the irresistibly on-sweep- 
ing mass, of our vast industrial democracy. 

The best evidence that this will happen is the 
fact that it is already happening. There are 
here and there amateurs without amateurishness, 
professionals untainted by professionalism. Many 
of us are fortunate enough to recognize in some 
friend this combination of qualities, this union of 
strict professional training with that free outlook 
upon life, that human curiosity and eagerness, 
which are the best endowment of the amateur. 
Such men are indeed rare, but they are prized ac- 
cordingly. And one need hardly say where they 
are most likely to be found. It is among the 
ranks of those who have received a liberal edu- 
cation. Every higher institution of learning in 



32 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

this country now offers some sort of specialized 
training. To win distinction in academic work is 
to come under the dominion of exact knowledge, 
of approved methods. It means that one is disci- 
plined in the mechanical processes and guided by 
the spirit of modern science, no matter what his 
particular studies may have been. The graduates 
whose acquisitions can most readily be assessed 
are probably the ones who have specialized most 
closely, who have already as undergraduates begun 
to fit themselves for some form of professional 
career. They have already gained something of 
the expert's solid basis of accurate information, 
the expert's sureness of hand and eye, the ex- 
pert's instinct for the right method. 

But this professional discipline needs temper- 
ing by another spirit. The highest service of the 
educated man in our democratic society demands 
of him breadth of interest as well as depth of 
technical research. It requires unquenched ardor 
for the best things, spontaneous delight in the 
play of mind and character, a many-sided respon- 
siveness that shall keep a man from hardening 
into a mere high-geared machine. It is these 
qualities that perfect a liberal education and 



THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 33 

complete a man's usefulness to his generation. 
Taken by themselves, they fit him primarily for 
living, rather than for getting a living. But they 
are not to be divorced from other qualities ; and 
even if they were, the educated American can 
get a living more easily than he can learn how to 
live. The moral lessons are harder than the in- 
tellectual, and faith and enthusiasm, sympathy 
and imagination, are moral qualities. 

Here, for example, is some young scholar who 
has been taught the facts of history, trained to 
sift historical evidence, to compare historical 
periods, to trace historical causes; but has he 
imagination enough to see into the mind and 
heart of the historical man ? He has been taught 
to analyze the various theories of society and 
government ; he has learned to sneer at what he 
calls "glittering generalities; " yet has he sym- 
pathy enough, moral passion enough, to under- 
stand what those glittering generalities have done 
for the men and the generations that have been 
willing to die for them? Such secrets forever 
elude the cold heart and the calculating brain. 
But they are understood by the generous youth, 
by the man who is brave enough to take chances, 



34: THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

to risk all for the sake of gaining all. It is for 
this reason that the amateur football game, for all 
its brutalities, has taught many a young scholar 
a finer lesson than the classroom has taught him, 
namely, to risk his neck for his college ; yet no 
finer one than the classroom might afford him if 
his teacher were always an amator, — a lover of 
virility as well as of accuracy ; a follower not of 
the letter only, but of the spirit which makes 
alive. " Our business in this world," said Kobert 
Louis Stevenson, — a craftsman who through all 
his heart-breaking professional toil preserved the 
invincible gayety of the lover, - — "is not to suc- 
ceed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." 
In this characteristically Stevensonian paradox 
there is a perfect and a very noble expression of 
the amateur spirit. He does not mean, we may 
be sure, that failure is preferable to success, but 
that more significant than either success or fail- 
ure is the courage with which one rides into the 
lists. It is his moral attitude toward his work 
which lifts the workman above the fatalities of 
time and chance, so that, whatever fortune befall 
the labor of his hands, the travail of his soul 
remains undefeated and secure. 



INDIFFEEENTISM 



INDIFFEKENTISM 

Readers of books have sometimes debated the 
question, " What was the greatest book produced 
during the eighteenth century ? " Was it Goethe's 
Faust, or Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of 
the Will ? Was it Gibbon's Decline and Fall^ 
or that romance of Fielding's which Gibbon de- 
clared would " outlive the palace of the Escurial, 
and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria " ? 
It is hard to answer such a question, and very 
likely it is foolish to try. An easier task is to 
name the wittiest book of that century. One may 
do so without much fear of contradiction. The 
wittiest eighteenth-century book, surely, — al- 
though Wordsworth does call it, and in The Ex- 
cursion at that, a 

" dull product of a scoffer's pen," 

and Hawthorne once fell asleep over it, — is Vol- 
taire's Candide, or Optimism. Written in 1759 
to satirize the doctrine that ours is the best of 



38 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

all possible worlds, Candide presents, in the form 
of a swiftly moving story, Voltaire's impression 
of the world as it really is. He exiles his young 
hero Candide — "a person of the most unaffected 
simplicity" — from his native castle in West- 
phalia, separates him from his beloved mistress 
Cunegunde, and sends him over Europe and Amer- 
ica to seek for her and incidentally to observe 
our mortal situation. Candide is accompanied 
by an old philosopher named Martin, who has 
long served as a bookseller's hack and has lost all 
illusions. As they pass from one European capi- 
tal to another, Candide still maintains in spite of 
every disappointment and misfortune that " there 
is nevertheless some good in the world." 

" Maybe so," says Martin, " but it has escaped 
my knowledge." 

Reasoning thus, they arrive at last at Venice, 
where they hear much talk about a certain noble 
Venetian, Signor Pococurante, whose name signi- 
fies " The-Man-who-cares-little," and who is said 
to be a perfectly happy man. 

" I should be glad to meet so extraordinary a 
being," says Martin, and accordingly our travel- 
ers pay a visit to the noble Pococurante. They 



INDIFFERENT1SM 39 

find him dwelling in a palace on the Brenta. Its 
gardens are elegantly laid out and adorned with 
statues. The master of the palace is a man of 
sixty, rich, cultivated, bored. He shows the trav- 
elers his collection of paintings, among them 
some by Raphael. " I have what is called a fine 
collection," he admits, " but I take no manner of 
delight in them." He orders a concert for his 
guests, but confesses that he himself finds the 
music tiresome. After dinner they repair to the 
library, where Candide, observing a richly bound 
Homer, commends the noble Venetian's taste. 

" Homer is no favorite of mine," answers Po- 
cocurante coolly ; " I was made to believe once 
that I took a pleasure in reading him. ... I 
have asked some learned men whether they are 
not in reality as much tired as myself with read- 
ing this poet. Those who spoke ingenuously 
assured me that he had made them fall asleep, 
and yet that they could not well avoid giving 
him a place in their libraries." 

The conversation shifts to Virgil, Horace, 
Cicero ; to the Memoirs of the Academy of Sci- 
ences, to the drama, to English politics, and 
finally to Milton ; but Signor Pococurante finds 



40 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

in all these subjects little or nothing to praise. 
Candide the optimist is grieved. He has been 
taught to respect Homer and is fond of Milton. 

" Alas," he whispers to Martin, " I am afraid 
this man holds our German poets in great con- 
tempt." 

" There would be no such great harm in that," 
replies Martin. 

" Oh, what a surprising man ! " exclaims Can- 
dide to himself. " What a prodigious genius is 
this Pococurante ! Nothing can please him." 

After finishing their survey of the library, 
they go down into the garden. Candide politely 
says something in praise of its beauty. 

" It is laid out in bad taste," replies Pococu- 
rante ; " it is childish and trifling ; but I shall 
have another laid out to-morrow upon a nobler 
plan." 

At last the two travelers take leave of their 
host. " Well," says Candide to Martin, " I hope 
you will own that this man is the happiest of all 
mortals, for he is above everything he possesses." 

" But do you not see," answers Martin, " that 
he likewise dislikes everything he possesses ? It 
was an observation of Plato long since that those 



INDIFFERENTISM 41 

are not the best stomachs that reject, without 
distinction, all sorts of food." 

" True," says Candide, " but still there must 
certainly be a pleasure in criticising everything, 
and in perceiving faults where others think they 
see beauties." 

" That is" retorts Martin, who generally has 
the last word, " there is a pleasure in having no 
pleasure" 

Few pages of imaginative literature are more 
admirably written than these whose bare out- 
lines I have been copying. No group of inquirers 
concerning the intellectual habits and the moral 
hopes of mankind is more skillfully composed 
than that formed by the three men who saunter 
through the library and garden of this palace 
upon the Brenta: Candide the puzzled young 
optimist, old Martin the pessimist, grimly de- 
lighted, and Pococurante the indifferentist, with 
his perfect courtesy, his refreshing frankness, 
his infinite capacity for being bored. In this 
last personage, particularly, there is something 
which touches the fancy, provokes curiosity, and 
possibly, in spite of all disapprobation of the 



42 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

noble Venetian's faults, invites to a closer ac- 
quaintance. One may venture therefore to con- 
sider the type of mind which the Venetian senator 
represents, and to discuss, in their bearing upon 
the life of the modern man, some of the old and 
new forms of indifferentism. 

For Signor Pococurante is by no means a 
mere clever invention of Voltaire's. We have 
met the gentleman before. The type is older 
than the eighteenth century ; older than the 
Horatian doctrine of nil admirari ; older even 
than the Hebrew king who, like the Venetian 
senator, had his men-singers and women-singers, 
his banquets and palaces and pleasure-gardens, 
and grew tired of them all. The weariness of 
the mind in full possession of its treasures, as 
that of the body surfeited with its pleasures, is a 
familiar fact in human history. Pococurantism 
— the caring little for things that are worth 
caring much for — lurks deep in human nature. 
But there are certain conditions that bring the 
seed of it to full flowering. Every cultivated 
circle of men and women, every highly organized 
society, has its Pococurantes ; nay, there is some 
drop of their blood in all of us who have had 



INDIFFERENTISM 43 

free access to the fine excitements of the senses, 
to the wide interests of the mind. Once liberate 
a man through education and opportunity, once 
make him a free citizen of the great world of 
thought, introduce him to affairs, to art and 
literature, and you give the indifferentism latent 
in him a chance to develop itself. Is there an 
educated person who has not noticed among his 
friends — and, if he be gifted with any power of 
self -analysis, in himself — this tendency to regard 
with dissatisfaction, with finical criticism, with 
satiety, objects which are not only worthy but 
which once filled him with admiring joy ? 

Salient examples of this familiar phenomenon 
are always to be found in communities where the 
academic type of character is strongly marked. 
In every university town you will hear much 
talk of the local Signor Pococurante, some 
scholar of fastidious temper, of taste scrupulously 
refined, against whose severe standards of criti- 
cism, whether in architecture, poetry, or politics, 
the heathen rage. How useful such personages 
often are! Their smiling indifference to the 
popular verdict strengthens the wavering inde- 
pendence of weaker men. The very irritation pro- 



44 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

duced by their criticism is often proof that the 
faults they perceive are real faults, and should be 
remedied. How characteristic of such men is the 
following passage from the Memoirs of Mark 
Pattison : — 

" It is impossible for me to see anything done 
without an immediate suggestion of how it might 
be better done. I cannot travel by railway with- 
out working out in my mind a better time-table 
than that in use. On the other hand, this rest- 
lessness of the critical faculty has done me good 
service when turned upon myself. I have never 
enjoyed any self-satisfaction in anything I have 
ever done, for I have inevitably made a mental 
comparison with how it might have been better 
done. The motto of one of my diaries, ' Quic- 
quid hie operis fiat pcenitet,' may be said to be 
the motto of my life." 

Undoubtedly, this restlessness of the critical 
faculty contributes to human progress. And how 
upright may be the character of the super-subtle 
critic, how singularly attractive his personal 
charm ! 

Yet after all, in spite of Candide's ingenuous 
opinion, the fact that " nothing pleases " a man 



INDIFFERENTISM 45 

does not prove him a " prodigious genius." That 
he is " above everything he possesses " does not 
demonstrate any native power, any insight of 
imaginative sympathy. Nor do academic commu- 
nities present more pathetic figures than the 
pococurantists who are without fame, influence, 
or many friends; whose refinement of feeling 
has degenerated into querulousness, and whose 
exalted standards of action are chiefly displayed 
in their ability to cooperate, to any useful pur- 
pose, with our American world as it actually is. 

No one has yet written, I believe, the His- 
tory of Academic Sterility. Whoever may do so 
will consult Gray and Gibbon as to the moral 
stagnation of the English universities in the 
eighteenth century, and Mark Pattison as to 
their intellectual apathy in the middle of the 
nineteenth. " The men of middle age," says Pat- 
tison in speaking of Oxford, " seem, after they 
reach thirty-five or forty, to be struck with an 
intellectual palsy, and betake themselves, no 
longer to port, but to the frippery work of at- 
tending boards and negotiating some phantom of 
legislation, with all the importance of a cabinet 
council — belli simulacra cientes* Then they 



46 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

give each other dinners, where they assemble 
again with the comfortable assurance that they 
have earned their evening relaxation by the 
fatigues of the morning's committee." 

But we need not look abroad for such exam- 
ples of pedantry, of the false air of accomplish- 
ment, of arrested development. Fortunate is the 
American institution that has none of this sterile 
stock, these men who have been surrounded by 
books, museums, galleries, only to discover at 
last that they have no pleasure in them. To de- 
scribe adequately such types of barrenness one 
must employ those terrible metaphors used long 
ago to portray secret causes of spiritual failure. 
A wins at last his professorship ; his desire has 
been granted, but leanness has been sent into his 
soul. B possesses all the apparatus of scholarship, 
but by middle life there is no more oil in his lamp. 
The lamp goes out, while the man lives on. Yet 
in the same county, perhaps, there will be men 
of straitened means, with few modern facilities 
for research, slender libraries, little converse with 
fellow scholars, who are nevertheless steadily, 
quietly, building up a national, an international 
reputation ; while the pococurantist, with every- 



INDIFFERENT1SM 47 

thing he needs at his elbow, fairly choked with 
the riches and pleasures of the scholarly life, not 
only brings no fruit to perfection, but even fails 
to produce any fruit at all. 

One may be pardoned for thus alluding to the 
academic type of indifferentism, since its features 
are so familiar. But there are many varieties of 
indifferentists, up and down the world, and all of 
them are worth studying. What sort of man was 
that Gallio whose unconcern for sectarian con- 
troversy has proverbialized him as the man who 
"cared for none of these things"? I imagine 
that Gallio was a companionable soul, full of 
savor, but who knows? And who can tell us 
authoritatively about the real Horace, that ripe 
specimen of the genial pococurantist whose bland 
worldliness, dislike of being bored, and frank 
indifference to the ambitions and passions of the 
hour make him such a charming figure ? Old 
Omar Khayyam is a more subtle pococurantist, 
of the pessimist species ; and Edward FitzGerald, 
Omar's sponsor, was on many sides of his com- 
plex personality as perfect a Signor Pococurante 
as was ever bred by university training and sub- 



48 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

sequent insulation from the world. Is there not 
some humanist who will analyze the secret springs 
of indifferentism in men like these ? Is it a de- 
fect of the will, or a surplusage of philosophy? 
Is it a strange torpor of the mind, or is it rather 
the result of a too keen intelligence ? Or is it 
merely " temperament " ? Professor Flint, who 
has recently dissected Agnosticism with the prac- 
ticed skill of a Scotch logician, might be asked 
to make a diagnosis of Pococurantism as well. 
His book would be interesting reading, but I 
fancy that Gallio and FitzGerald would put it 
aside with a quizzical smile. 

It is not too fanciful to say that there are in- 
differentists produced by ignorance, as well as by 
a surfeit of knowledge. Whole classes and races 
are apparently doomed to a happy-go-lucky, semi- 
tropical indolence of body and spirit, — amusing 
enough to the traveler, but yet dull and blind. It 
may stretch our Italian word too far, to make it 
cover these coarser forms of indifference to ex- 
cellence, — forms that spring from sheer uncon- 
sciousness rather than from satiety with the 
objects of intellectual curiosity. Likewise it may 
be taking too much liberty with the word to 



INDIFFERENTISM 49 

apply it to that unconcern for the ordinary tastes 
and pleasures of mankind which results from ab- 
sorption in some supreme issue. How many a 
mediaeval saint demonstrated his sainthood by 
caring for none of these things that move us to 
such transports, such pursuits, such struggles ! 
" Did you enjoy the lake?" runs the famous story 
about St. Bernard, who had been journeying all 
day beside the waters of Geneva. " Lake? " re- 
plied the saint in mild surprise, "what lake?" 
There may be a strain of ethical nobility, no 
doubt, in this forgetfulness of all sensuous 
beauty. But the type of soul represented by the 
dreaming saint has always been rare, and seems 
to be growing rarer. Few high-minded men and 
women are now content to press into the solitary 
ways of lonely spiritual rapture ; the path of pro- 
gress leads them no longer to cells in the high 
Alps. The men and women most keenly alive to 
spiritual issues are insisting upon the social 
duties, the validity of social instincts, the claims 
of the innumerable close-woven bonds of human 
relationship. The true saints, whether of the 
mediaeval or modern type, are never, strictly 
speaking, Pococurantes. They care infinitely, 



50 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

whether for one or many things, but it is true 
that their sense of values has been so reversed, 
as compared with that of ordinary men, that like 
the risen Lazarus in Browning's poem, the things 
which seem trivial to us are all important to 
them, while their great concerns are our trivi- 
alities. Yet in this very detachment from the 
average standard of judgment, in their sense of 
superiority to their surroundings and possessions, 
they illustrate, singularly enough, a suggestive 
phase of indifferentism. 

It is evident that I have just been choosing 
extreme examples. But somewhere between the 
peasant, who is indifferent to ideas because his 
eyes are darkened, and the saint, whose inner 
light makes the world of ideas a mere flickering 
unreality, stand men like Horace and Horace 
Walpole, Montaigne and Goethe, Franklin and 
Jefferson, the speculative, amused, undeluded 
children of this world. Such men do not lack 
interest in human affairs, but they weigh all 
things coolly, and register the gravity or the 
levity of our mortal predicament with the same 
smile. Even if no pococurantists themselves, 
they are the begetters of Pococurantism in 



INDIFFERENTISM 51 

others. For behind such representative figures, 
sharing their recurrent skepticism, but wanting 
their robust curiosity, their unimpaired sanity, 
are grouped the great majority of privileged, 
educated men. Few of them escape some touch, 
sooner or later, of the temper of indifferentism. 
With one it is a mere sophomoric affectation, — 
a pretense of unconcern, — while with another 
it deepens into lifelong habit. But to all of us 
at times the mood of " caring little " comes. 
Subtle are the disguises, puzzling are the contra- 
dictory manifestations of the loss of interest in 
the normally interesting. The child pokes into 
the inside of its doll, and straightway possesses 
one delightful mystery the less ; the worldling 
finds his game not worth the candle ; the states- 
man sees his great plans crumbling like a house 
of cards, and often realizes that at heart he cares 
for them as little. And all this disillusionment 
may come, as it did to our Venetian senator, 
without making the man discourteous or unkind. 
Indeed it sometimes seems to deepen the pococu- 
rantist's humaner qualities, as if disillusionment 
were the sign of initiation into a world-wide 
fraternity, the seal of our mortal experience. 



52 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

Here is a well-known passage from the auto- 
biography of one of the most gentle, honest, and 
unquestionably great men of our own day. It 
is the passage where Charles Darwin confesses 
his loss of interest in certain things which had 
once moved him deeply. The words are fre- 
quently commented upon as illustrating the atro- 
phy of unused faculties. That is indeed their 
obvious purport, but as you read them, note how 
perfectly they echo, more than a century after- 
ward, the very tones of Signor Pococurante's 
confession in his library : — 

" I have said that in one respect my mind has 
changed during the last twenty or thirty years. 
Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of 
many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, 
Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave 
me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took 
intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the 
historical plays. I have also said that formerly 
pictures gave me considerable, and music very 
great delight. But now for many years I cannot 
endure to read a line of poetry : I have tried lately 
to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably 
dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost 



INDIFFERENTISM 53 

lost my taste for pictures or music. Music gen- 
erally sets me thinking too energetically on what 
I have been at work on, instead of giving me 
pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, 
but it does not cause me the exquisite delight 
which it formerly did. . . . 

" This curious and lamentable loss of the 
higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books 
on history, biographies, and travels (independ- 
ently of any scientific facts which they may con- 
tain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest 
me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to 
have become a kind of machine for grinding 
general laws out of large collections of facts, but 
why this should have caused the atrophy of that 
part of the brain alone, on which the higher 
tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a 
mind more highly organized or better constituted 
than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suf- 
fered ; and if I had to live my life again, I would 
have made a rule to read some poetry and listen 
to some music at least once every week ; for per- 
haps the parts of my brain now atrophied would 
thus have been kept active through use. The loss 
of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may 



54 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

possibly be injurious to the intellect and more 
probably to the moral character, by enfeebling 
the emotional part of our nature." 

The famous naturalist's experience has been 
that of countless men whose devotion to their 
own chosen field has left them more and more 
oblivious of general human or aesthetic interests. 
There are plenty of Latinists who read Virgil 
not for the poetry but for material for a theory 
of the subjunctive, and they gradually forget 
that there is any poetry there. It would be easy 
to multiply examples of this narrowing influence 
of over-specialization. And it is instructive to 
note that in every field except the one selected 
for his concentrated activity, the specialist often 
offers a curious parallel to his arch-enemy the 
amateur. Sooner or later, both tend to become 
pococurantists as regards the majority of sub- 
jects of human intercourse. " I went into that a 
good deal at one time," says Mr. Brooke in Mid- 
dlemarch. It is the typical remark of the typical 
amateur. "Poetry and pictures formerly gave 
me great pleasure," says Darwin. " I was once 
persuaded that I enjoyed Homer and Kaphael," 
says our Venetian senator. The three confessions 



INDIFFERENTISM 55 

are identical ; the amateur and the specialist have 
now arrived at the same point as the born poco- 
curantist. 

There are other examples of intellectual and 
moral indifferentism no less striking, although 
widely different in their source. A jaded Amer- 
ican millionaire, trying to get pleasure out of a 
too long deferred holiday in Europe, is one of 
the most depressing of pococurantist spectacles. 
For twenty or thirty years he has been amassing 
a fortune, with the pluck and energy which we 
all admire. And here he is set down in Paris or 
Dresden or Florence, ignorant of the language, 
the history, the architecture, the ideas of the 
country. He is a good fellow, but he is home- 
sick, listless, indifferent : he speeds his automo- 
bile along some famous Roman road without once 
kindling at the thought of Caesar or Napoleon ; 
the Mediterranean means to him Monte Carlo ; 
and nothing in his trip gives him so much real 
satisfaction as to buttonhole a fellow American 
and talk to him about the superiority of New 
York hotels. He is taking his holiday too late. 
He has no longer any oil in his lamp. Curiosity, 



56 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

imagination, sympathy, zest, have been burned 
out of him in that fierce competitive struggle 
where his life forces have been spent. He is a 
victim of a system, — of the quantitative rather 
than the qualitative test of excellence. None of 
our contemporary hallucinations leads more cer- 
tainly to ultimate weariness and indifferentism 
than this too exclusive glorification of " men who 
do things." We worship size, efficiency, tangible 
results. With the late W. E. Henley in his au- 
tomobile poem we cry : — 

"Speed — 
Speed, and a world of new havings, 



Learning 1 and Drink 

And Money and Song, 

Ships, Folios, and Horses, 

The craft of the Healer, 

The worship of God 

And things done to the instant 

Delight of the Devil 

And all, all that tends 

To his swift-to-come, swif t-to-go 

Glory, are tested, 

Gutted, exhausted, 

Chucked down the draught ; 

And the quest, the pursuit, 

The attack, and the conquest 



INDIFFERENTISM 57 

Of the Unknown goes on — 
Goes on in the Joy of the Lord." 

It is a fascinating, record-breaking schedule 
for the road-race for Success, but a man may 
without cowardice confess that he is afraid of it. 
One sees too many broken-down machines in the 
roadside ditch. Study the faces of the Men Who 
Do Things, of the Men of To-morrow, as you 
find them presented in the illustrated periodi- 
cals. They are strong, straightforward faces, the 
sign of a powerful, high-geared bodily mechan- 
ism. These men are the winners in the game 
which our generation has set itself to play. But 
many of the faces are singularly hard, insensi- 
tive, untouched by meditation. If we have pur- 
chased speed and power at the cost of nobler 
qualities, if the men who do things are bred at 
the expense of the men who think and feel, 
surely the present American model needs modifi- 
cation. 

For there has been a good deal of human his- 
tory made upon this planet before the invention 
of the automobile, and one of the most obvious 
lessons of that history is the moral indifference 
which is apt to follow upon great material sue- 



58 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

cess. We perceive that something is wrong even 
with the courteous superiority of Signor Pococu- 
rante. We feel that it is a flaw in an otherwise 
kindly and attractive character. But what shall 
we say of the moral insensibility, the sheer reck- 
lessness of human life, the selfish indifference to 
the welfare of weaker races, in which the present 
decade abounds ? It is a new form of Pococu- 
rantism, and one far more dangerous than any 
dilettante type, because it attacks stronger men. 

" Speed, and a world of new havings," 

no matter who or what may lie in the path ! 
That is its watchword. It has taken new accents 
in our own days, but it is after all the old hoarse 
shout of Philistinism, trusting in its sword and 
spear and shield. 

Nor are its less militant aspects any less fun- 
damentally barbaric. " How pleasant," says one 
of the citizens in the Easter Sunday scene in 
Faust, " to sit here and empty your glass and 
think of the people fighting far away ! " 

" On Sundays, holidays, there 's naught I take delight in 
Like gossiping of war and war's array, 
Where down in Turkey, far away, 
The foreign people are a-fighting." 



INDIFFERENTISM 59 

But beneath even this softer and more smug 
Philistinism, — wrapped comfortably in material 
progress, full of good nature, of benevolent sen- 
timent, of jocosity, — what indifference there may 
be toward the good old cause of world-wide liberty 
and fraternity, what essential hardness of heart ! 

It is a long journey from Venice in the eigh- 
teenth century to America in the twentieth. Yet 
the decaying commercial republic of Italy, draw- 
ing to itself even in its decline the treasures of 
the East and West, offering to the stranger, with 
a sort of splendid affluence, both its best and its 
worst, presents more than one likeness to the vast, 
prosperous America of to-day. Among our coun- 
trymen who have enjoyed full opportunities for 
culture, there are few who have not at times 
shared the listlessness, the apathy of that Vene- 
tian nobleman who was cloyed with his own trea- 
sures. How can it be otherwise ? How can the 
man or woman of normal power constantly re- 
spond to the multiform stimulus of these swift 
days of ours ? Who can adequately react even to 
the news contained in the morning paper? Here 
is the life of the whole world brought daily to the 



60 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

door. But who is ready to weigh it, sift it, assimi- 
late it ? No wonder that men and women of fine 
fibre are conscious too often of that lassitude 
which comes from wandering through the rooms 
of a great museum, a weariness like that which 
oppresses the conscientious sight-seer at a World's 
Fair. 

We cannot rest, meditate, dream, without miss- 
ing our train, breaking our engagement. We 
hurry on, through this crowded, absorbing, splen- 
didly rich and varied life of contemporary 
America, a race of a few athletes and millions of 
nervous dyspeptics. We are a restless people, 
hypnotized with transient enthusiasms. To-day we 
plan a marble archway for a naval hero, build 
it to-morrow in plaster, and the day after tear it 
down. We idolize the phrases of the Declaration 
of Independence for two or three generations, 
and then suddenly make the discovery that they 
are mere generalities, good enough for the library, 
but inapplicable to practical affairs. All the 
wealth of our physical resources, all the marvels of 
our tangible success, are not enough, it appears, to 
save us from the Old World vice of indifferent- 
ism, from the swift relapse into disillusionment. 



INDIFFERENTISM 61 

Let us come back to Voltaire's parable. He 
was a master of dialectic weapons, and in this 
novel about the quest of happiness he scores his 
point with impeccable precision. Signor Pococu- 
rante is not happy. Candide is searching for a 
perfectly happy person, and he does not find one, 
even in that admirably furnished palace upon the 
Brenta. A man's life, in other words, consists not 
in the abundance of the things which he pos- 
sesses. Yet the road to happiness is not through 
caring little, — as the Stoics will still have it, — 
but through caring much and continuing to care 
much. It is the ardent, luminous mind, not the 
smothered, hypercritical mind, which has the 
truer perception of values. The disillusionized 
man is not necessarily the wise man. Hamlet was 
wiser, more truly philosophical in the university 
at Wittenberg, where he was doubtless taught 
" What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in 
reason ! how infinite in faculty ! " than he was 
later, when, in the stress of unequal conflict with 
the world, he added the sad personal footnote, 
" And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of 
dust?" 

In actual human intercourse, furthermore, 



62 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

your disillusionized man or woman is, to put it 
plainly, apt to prove himself a bore. It is amus- 
ing enough for a while to hear some melancholy 
Jaques wittily rail and sneer, but it soon grows 
tiresome. The most agreeable companion in the 
game of life is what golfers call the "cheerful 
duffer," who plays shockingly, it is true, but who 
is always hoping and struggling to beat bogey on 
the next hole. It is in the mood of the awkward 
idealist, and not of the graceful pococurantist, 
that most of the good work of the world is done. 
There is plentiful absurdity, no doubt, in the 
popular interpretation of what has been so widely 
heralded as the doctrine of " strenuousness." As 
a counter-gospel to that of mere fault-finding 
inertia or obstructionism, strenuousness is well 
enough. But superficially understood, it may 
mean nothing more than the cult of activity for 
its own sake ; " hustling," as we love to say, 
for the mere end of being a " hustler." No na- 
tion ever needed such a doctrine less than we. 
We have already too much headlong hurry that 
does not count : like the nervous pulling on and 
off of sweaters by the substitutes on the side- 
lines of a football-field, it shows feverish activity 



INDIFFERENTISM 63 

and energy, but it does not advance the ball. 
The real purport of the strenuous doctrine is 
rather this: that life is infinitely significant; 
that it should not be frittered away, either in 
finical criticism or in foolish, irrelevant activities. 
It is meant to be used, — intelligently, fully, gen- 
erously. Those are fine lines of Henry van 
Dyke: — 

" Life is an arrow — therefore you must know 
What mark to aim at, how to use the bow — 
Then draw it to the head, and let it go ! " 

It is the good fortune of some men and women 
to feel instinctively this potential value of hu- 
man life. Others learn it tardily, after the oil 
in the lamp is low. But nothing is more inspir- 
iting than to see human beings make the great 
acceptance, and devote themselves to some gen- 
erous service. The bow is meant to shoot with, 
and not to hang on the wall. It improves with 
age, and so should men and women. " We grow 
simpler," wrote Thackeray, " as we grow older." 

For, after all, these contemporary forms of 
indifferentism are not final. We shall doubtless 
specialize more, rather than less, and yet the 
narrowing tendencies of absorption in one's own 



64 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

specialty may be resisted. The lassitude that 
marks the reaction from great and long-con- 
tinued effort is perhaps inevitable ; but in those 
hours one may refresh himself from the deep 
fountains that spring up within the soul. One's 
individual success or happiness may tempt him 
to regard the less fortunate with an indifferent 
eye, but in a democracy like ours Dives and 
Lazarus may always be trusted to shift places, 
if you will but give them time. 

To avoid that cold, paralyzing touch of indif- 
ferentism, one can at least endeavor to live sim- 
ply. There is even now apparent, in the press, 
in many strange pulpits, and in the private talk 
of men in every section of the country, a whole- 
some tendency to praise this " simple life." It is 
perhaps a by-product of prosperity, for the doc- 
trine it praises is more easily followed by the 
rich than by the poor. A fine simplicity of mind 
often accompanies great wealth, while poverty is 
as often the cause of perpetual duplicity and 
fear. But fortunately for our generation, both 
rich and poor have been rediscovering Nature. 
We have found sources of joy in familiar sur- 
roundings and in common things. It is one step 



INDIFFERENTISM 65 

toward rediscovering ourselves. ie Simplifica- 
tion," as Mr. John Morley has so often pointed 
out, was the motto of that Eevolution which fol- 
lowed so swiftly upon the mood of Voltairean 
doubt; and now that a whole cycle of experi- 
ence has been accomplished, simplification should 
be the watchword once more. "Plain living 
and high thinking " is a hackneyed phrase, and 
represents for many of us but a forced virtue ; 
yet plain living and high thinking are at least 
not the soil in which Pococurantism flourishes. 
A quiet mind that recalls the enduring lessons 
of history, a meditative mind that perceives the 
secret of vitality in true books and true men, a 
sane mind that sees life wholesomely and hu- 
manly, — this is what one must cultivate if he 
would share the inexhaustible freshness, the un- 
ceasing energy, which make the daily gladness 
of the world. 

And the last words of Signor Pococurante 
himself are not to be forgotten. They relate, it 
may be remembered, to his garden. He is in- 
deed dissatisfied with it, as with everything else, 
and yet he adds, in words that almost redeem his 
character and testify to his essentially human 



66 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

quality : " I shall have another laid out to-mor- 
row upon a nobler plan." How persistent, how 
indestructible is idealism, even in the breast of 
a professed indifferentist ! This idealism is an 
integral part of our inheritance. Though baffled 
at every point, it underlies and corrects our tran- 
sient fits of despondent criticism. Indifferentism 
should be studied, controlled, counteracted ; but 
in most of us, after all, it is a mood only. It is 
a shadow on the landscape. Yet far below it in 
our nature there is the undefeated desire, the 
imperishable aspiration, that to-morrow may find 
us dwelling in another garden, built upon a 
nobler plan. That is our human heritage of toil 
and hope, and it is a man's part to reenter it 
daily with courage and good cheer. 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE 
PKOFESSOE 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 

It is an impertinence to ask a man still in the 
game whether the game be worth the candle. He 
thought so once, no doubt, or he would not have 
begun playing; and the courteous presumption 
is that he persists in his opinion. Whatever may 
be his secret guesses as to the value of the stake, 
your true sportsman will play the game out, and 
as long as he is playing his best, he makes but an 
indifferent philosopher. No man absorbed in a 
profession can assess critically that profession's 
claims and its rewards, but he can at least recall 
some of his anticipations upon entering it, and 
compare them with the realities of his actual ex- 
perience. 

To a young man with some taste for the things 
of the mind, the life of a college professor offers 
manifold points of attraction. The candidates for 
the profession have usually won some distinction 
as undergraduates, so that from the first moment 
of post-graduate study one has the feeling of asso- 



70 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

ciation and rivalry with picked men. The days 
when the valedictorian was invariably called back 
to his Alma Mater as a tutor, to be used in any 
department happening to be short of tutors that 
year, or when the Rev. Mr. Blinker of Mudville, 
famous in college as a mighty handler of the lexi- 
con, but quite unappreciated in Mudville, was on 
that account tolerably sure of getting a professor- 
ship, are indeed rapidly receding. Sometimes 
men drift into college work from other callings, 
or are drafted from among the teachers in pre- 
paratory schools, but the conventional road to 
promotion is some form of specialized graduate 
study. The experience of foreign life thus comes 
to many an American in the years when he is 
most impressionable to its stimulus and charm. 
Berlin and Leipsic, it is true, send back young 
doctors who are delightfully unconscious how 
much they must unlearn, but most of them get 
their bearings again long before they secure their 
coveted chairs. The years of preliminary training 
as tutor or assistant are likely to be happy years, 
too, in spite of drudgery and jealousies and hope 
deferred. There is the excitement of meeting 
one's first classes ; the first curious glimpse, it 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 71 

may be, into faculty meetings ; the first letter 
addressed to you as " Professor " — you bless the 
kindly error 5 the notice of your first paper ; the 
companionship of other young fellows like your- 
self, already infinitely removed from undergradu- 
ate sympathies, and not yet admitted to the inner 
circle of professorial intimacies. Lucky years, 
when spurs are to be had for the winning, and 
when many a teacher, without ever suspecting it, 
does the best work of his life ! 

At last, on the red-lettered day of all, comes 
the professorship, the solid-built chair that is 
warranted to last, instead of the temporary affair 
which you now turn over to the next man behind 
you. You are secure. Barring incapacitating ill- 
ness, and flagrant violation of the Decalogue, it 
is a life-appointment. The salary is small, but 
what there is of it is tolerably certain to be paid ; 
one can marry 011 it if he has the courage to live 
plainly. Your lifelong associates will be gentle- 
men. Your chosen field of work, in science or 
philosophy or literature, stretches before you in 
tempting vistas. One-third of the year will be 
vacation time and hence all your own, — for la- 
bor, if your ambition holds, for rest, if you find 



72 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

it flagging. You have the opportunity to impress 
the best there is in yourself upon a perpetually 
renewed stream of youthful and more or less ar- 
dent minds, and in this thought what satisfaction 
for the didactic instinct, for the ineradicable 
schoolmaster that is lurking in us all ! Can any 
profession offer a program half so certain, under 
normal conditions, of a fair fulfillment ? Surely 
the candle burns brightly at the beginning of the 
game. 

As the years go by, does the college professor 
regret his choice? I know a few who would 
gladly change their calling, but only a few, and 
these are mainly men of energetic, practical cast, 
who now recognize that by entering another pro- 
fession they might have quadrupled their in- 
come. Men of strong literary and scholarly bent 
are less likely to question the wisdom of their 
choice, and indeed, of those outside the college 
circle, it seems to be the " literary fellows " who 
speak with most envy of the professor's lot. 
Aside from lazy midsummer guesses at what one 
might have been — and who does not hazard 
these at times? — I find college teachers pecu- 
liarly contented. 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 73 

To turn to the material side of things, the 
assurance of a fixed income is a source of per- 
manent satisfaction, however disproportionate the 
income to the service that is rendered. To be 
sure, the salary of a full professor, the country- 
over, is little if at all in excess of $2000. In 
the larger universities it may rise to $3000 or 
something more, but the men who receive above 
$4000 are so few as to scarcely affect the gen- 
eral average. Aside from the bare possibility of 
a call to a richer institution, the college profes- 
sor is not likely to be earning more at fifty than 
at thirty. Unlike most other professions, there 
is here no gradual increase of income to give 
tangible evidence of a man's growth in power. 
Unless one has taken the Northern Farmer's 
thrifty advice and " gone where money is " when 
he married, his outlook as he faces old age is 
not reassuring. Pensions are extremely rare; 
college trustees are forced in most cases to be as 
ungrateful as republics. The cost of living has 
steadily risen in college towns, keeping pace 
with the general increase of luxury throughout 
the older communities. Here and there, particu- 
larly in the West, there are exceptions, but upon 



74 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

the whole the scale of necessary expenditure, for 
a man fulfilling the various social duties re- 
quired by his position, is constantly growing 
greater. The professor's incidental income from 
books and lectures is ordinarily insignificant. 
When he has paid his bills he finds no margin 
left for champagne and terrapin. If he smokes 
at all, he invents ingenious reasons for prefer- 
ring a pipe. He sees the light-hearted tutors sail 
for Europe every summer, but as for himself, he 
decides annually that it will be wiser to wait 
just one year more. Once in a while he will 
yield to the temptation to pick up a first edition 
or a good print, but Aldines and Rembrandt 
proofs are toys he may not dally with. In short, 
his tastes are cultivated beyond his income, and 
his sole comfort is in the Pharisaical reflection 
that this is better, after all, than to have more 
income than taste. If his meditations upon qua- 
ternions or Descartes or the lyric cry are liable 
to be interrupted by an insulting cook, striking 
for another dollar that he can ill spare, it is 
doubtless a device of Providence to keep him 
in healthy touch with actualities. It were a pity 
that in the colleges, of all places, high thinking 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 75 

and plain living should be quite divorced, and 
that the men whose duty it is to train American 
boys in citizenship as well as in letters should 
themselves have no need to practice the stern 
virtues of industry and thrift. 

No man's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with 
his salary, however, affords a complete indica- 
tion of his attitude toward his work. A more 
subtle arithmetic makes up the sum of failure or 
success. After ten, twenty, or thirty years of 
experience, the college professor may be analyst 
enough to pass verdict upon the result of his 
own efforts, but an outsider's estimate may even 
then be more accurate than his own. Besides, 
many a man's point of view becomes insensibly 
but increasingly modified after he has entered 
upon his vocation, so that it is difficult for him 
to decide whether his early ambitions have been 
realized. 

There are two professional types, assuredly, 
that are admirably adjusted to their environment; 
the born investigator, and the born teacher. Men 
belonging to the first of these classes find in re- 
search itself a sufficient recompense, ; their happi- 
ness is in widening the bounds of knowledge, and 



76 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

undermining stoutly intrenched stupidities, and 
adding to the effectiveness of human energy. Al- 
most every college has one or more of these men. 
The larger institutions have many of them, and 
the college community is their rightful place. 
They deserve their bed and board, — and their 
cakes and ale besides — even if they are too ab- 
sent-minded to remember their lecture hours, or 
too feebly magnetic to hold the attention of un- 
dergraduates. An unerring process of differenti- 
ation is constantly at work, marking out these 
born scholars and scientists from those of their 
colleagues who possess scholarly and scientific 
tastes, but who learn by the time they are forty 
that they are never likely to produce anything. 
These latter men often make noteworthy drill- 
masters. Their respect for original scholarship 
grows as they come to recognize that it is beyond 
their own reach. Though they discover the fu- 
tility of " doing something for " science or litera- 
ture themselves, they touch elbows daily with 
men who can, and they reflect something of the 
glory of it, and impart to their pupils a regard 
for sound learning. 

Not every teacher, of course, is an investigator 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR Z7 

manque. Your born teacher is as rare as a poet, 
and as likely to die young. Once in a while a 
college gets hold of one. It does not always 
know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him 
by over-driving, the moment he shows power ; or 
to let another college lure him away for a few 
hundred dollars more a year. But while he lasts 
— and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end 
of a long life — he transforms the lecture-hall as 
by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can 
call the roll of his old instructors, and among the 
martinets and the pedants and the piously inane 
can here and there come suddenly upon a man ; 
a man who taught him to think or helped him to 
feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon. 

Sometimes it happens that the great teacher is 
also a great investigator, but that is a miracle. 
For a man to be either one or the other — not to 
speak of being both — requires singular vitality. 
Outsiders usually underestimate the obstacles to 
successful professorial work. With regard to 
one's own scholarly ambitions, particularly, the 
steady term-time strain, the thankless and idle 
sessions of committees, the variety of demands 
upon one's time and energy, combine to make 



78 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

one pay a heavy price for winning distinction. 
You must do, upon the average, as much teach- 
ing as your colleagues, and the time for your 
magnum opus must either be stolen from that 
due your classes, or you must accomplish two 
days' work in one. It is true that the number of 
hours of classroom instruction required of the 
professor varies greatly in different institutions. 
Sometimes a schedule of four hours per week is 
considered sufficient, in the case of men who 
have won the right to devote themselves to ad- 
vanced research. In the smaller colleges, and for 
the younger men in the larger ones, the schedule 
is often sixteen or twenty hours. Perhaps twelve 
would be a fair average for colleges and univer- 
sities the country over. To teach college boys for 
two hours a day does not seem like a very severe 
task to one who has never tried it, but I have 
observed that most professors who have taught 
or lectured for two hours thoroughly well, putting 
their best powers into the task, are ready to quit. 
Few men can rivet the attention of fifty or a hun- 
dred students for one hour without feeling, five 
minutes after the end of it, that vitality has gone 
out of them. The emery wheel that wears out 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 79 

fastest cuts the diamond best ; and when a man 
boasts that he teaches without effort and weari- 
ness, he has sufficiently described his teaching. 
Every college town has its own pitiful or tragic 
stories of professors who have broken down ; they 
are usually the men whom the college could least 
afford to lose. It is no wonder that in the face 
of all this many professors cease trying to ride 
two horses at once ; they either do their duty by 
their classes and let the dust gather on the leaves 
of the magnum opus, or else they get over their 
class work with as little expenditure of energy as 
possible, and give to the magnum opus their real 
strength. And the college would not be the mi- 
crocosm it is if there were not some professors 
who abandon both ambitions after a little, be- 
coming quite incurable though often very charm- 
ing dead-beats ; and this, I confess, is the most 
interesting type of all. 

It is a pity that Mark Pattison, whose Memoirs 
throw so terribly frank a light upon the intel- 
lectual side of university life, did not leave be- 
hind him that essay upon Academic Sterility 
which I have already suggested that someone 
ought to write. He may have thought that 



80 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

AmieVs Journal pictured the malady, for once 
and all; and certainly Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
whose Langham is an attempted personification 
of the class, has succeeded only in clothing with 
an English garb the self -distrust and impotence 
of will of the lonely Genevese professor. There 
can be no reasonable doubt that the academic 
atmosphere is unfavorable to creative vigor. Few 
vital books come out of the universities. One 
cause, beyond question, is the prevalence of the 
critical spirit. 

" Our knowledge petrifies our rhymes." 

A sophisticated sense that everything has been 
written, and better than it is likely to be written 
again, is not the stuff from which literature is 
bred. It may be that a mere over -accumulation 
of material prevents the scholar from ever turn- 
ing his treasures to account ; the monumental 
treatise becomes arrested, like Mr. Casaubon's, 
in the pigeon-hole stage. Often, too, he outlives 
his former intellectual interests, and his drawers 
are crammed with various half -completed pieces 
of work, melancholy reminders of enthusiasms 
that have now grown cold and long years that 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 81 

have been wasted. In morbid self -depreciation or 
well-grounded despair of making any contribu- 
tion to the world's thought, and disgusted with 
class-room routine, many a gifted man, unwilling 
or unable to resign his chair, turns tramp. Care- 
less of public opinion, he adopts some pet avoca- 
tion for his vocation henceforth, makes an opiate 
out of a hobby, and settles down for the rest of 
his days into a fly-fisherman, or amateur photo- 
grapher, or cross-country saunterer, or novel 
reader. But it is then that he is worth knowing ! 
" May God forgive me," cried Sir Walter Scott 
to his Diary, " for thinking that anything can be 
made out of a schoolmaster ! " Ah, shade of Sir 
Walter, out of a schoolmaster who has survived 
his illusions and is cheerfully planting his cab- 
bages, there may be made the most delightful 
companion in the world ! 

It is because a college faculty exhibits this sur- 
prising range of types, illustrative, in little, of 
almost every variety of success and failure known 
to the greater world, that it furnishes so per- 
petually interesting a spectacle. No man who has 
returned to his own Alma Mater to teach is likely 
to forget the impressions received at those first 



82 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

faculty meetings, where lie has met on terms of 
absolute equality the gentlemen whose corporate 
action decided so many vital issues — as it then 
seemed — in his own undergraduate life. What 
a revelation to find that " the faculty " are very 
much like other men : with prejudices and favor- 
ite animosities ; capable of being much confused 
by a motion to amend an amendment, and much 
relieved by a proposition to refer to a committee ; 
the younger ones rigid and the older ones lenient 
in enforcing the letter of the law ; all of them glad 
to adjourn, and retire to their own toil or their 
own decorous beer and skittles ! But what mas- 
tery of parliamentary fence, on the part of old 
gentlemen who have been making and withdraw- 
ing motions for half a century ! 1 What deep 
wrath among the disciplinarians over that vote to 
restore the erring half-back (needed in Novem- 
ber) to full standing in his class ! What subtle 
argumentation, pro and con, over Smith's petition 
to be excused from chapel on the ground of his 
physician's written statement that Smith's eye- 

1 I recall one such expert, who, at the first faculty meeting- of 
the college year, offered a prayer that he and his colleagues 
might be endowed with " holy skill." 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 83 

lids are liable to inflammation upon sudden ex- 
posure to the morning air ! What passionate 
denunciation of the faculty's past injustice in 
the famous Robinson case, pronounced by some 
sunny-tempered philosopher who has just per- 
suaded himself that whenever the student body 
differs with the faculty on a moral question the 
students are surely in the right! And is it not 
singular that over that question of Jones's rank, 
which any man in the room could settle satis- 
factorily enough in two minutes if left to him- 
self, two or three dozen educated and experi- 
enced gentlemen should sit in futile misery for 
half an hour, only, at the end of it, to follow 
sheeplike some obstinate motion that takes them 
through precisely the wrong hole in the wall? 
Until the psychology of mobs is better compre- 
hended, there will be no understanding the ways 
of " faculty action." Even when we shall have 
learned that the normal powers of the two or 
three dozen men are under some strange para- 
lyzing inhibition, shall we be able to explain 
why the inhibition should proceed from the most 
thick-headed man in the room ? 

To these gentlemen who grow old in the shel- 



y 



84 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

tered academic life, a thousand whimsicalities 
and petty formalities attach themselves, like bar- 
nacles to the bottom of a ship long at anchor. 
No man can teach ten years and escape them. 
Unbeknown to himself he is already on the 
way to becoming a " character," and people are 
smiling at him in their sleeves. If he finds him- 
self at a reception, he buttonholes a colleague 
and talks shop. The habit of addressing boys, 
without contradiction, leaves him often impotent 
in the sharp give-and-take of talk with men, and 
many a professor who is eloquent in his class- 
room is helpless on the street, or in the club, or 
across the dinner-table. Sometimes he perceives 
this, and makes pathetic efforts to grow worldly. 
Faculty circles have been known to experience 
strange obsessions of frivolity, and to plunge 
desperately into dancing lessons or duplicate 
whist. Both the remedy and the disease have 
their comic aspects, and yet I know of no circles 
where the twilight hour of familiar talk is more 
delightful, where common instincts and training 
and old associations touch the ordinary court- 
esies of life with a more peculiar charm, where 
mutual pride is so little spoiled by familiarity, 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 85 

and where lifelong friendships, undisturbed by the 
accidents frequent in the greater world, grow so 
intimate and touching as the evil days draw nigh. 
A professor's attitude toward the undergrad- 
uates is a good test of his personality, but a still 
better one may be found in their attitude toward 
him. They are shrewd judges of character, intol- 
erant of shams, and demoniacally ingenious in 
finding the weak places in a man's armor. If he 
is a shirk or an ignoramus, they know it as soon 
as he — perhaps sooner. Your college student is 
a strange compound of reverence and irrever- 
ence, conservative and anarchist, man and boy. 
If you decide to treat him as a youngster he 
straightway astonishes you by his maturity; if 
you thereupon make up your mind to consider 
him henceforth as a man, he will be guilty of 
prompt and enthusiastic lapses into juvenility. 
An American college is half public school, half 
university. Toward professors whom they like, 
students are finely loyal, though the curious 
alternations of popularity which fall to some 
teachers at the hands of successive classes are 
quite beyond the reach of analysis. If they do 
not like a professor, and can get the whip hand 



86 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

over him, undergraduates know how to demon- 
strate that twenty is the age of perfect cruelty. 
In few college recitation rooms, nowadays, is 
there anything said about the whip hand, but it 
is always there, on one side or the other. Every 
lecture hall witnesses a daily though possibly un- 
conscious struggle of talent, training, and char- 
acter against the crowd. The lecturer usually 
wins, because he knows he must, but many a 
one who has never experienced defeat invariably 
rises, like Gough, with knees that tremble. La- 
boratory and seminary methods of instruction 
alter these conditions, of course, and bring the 
professor at once into informal and even inti- 
mate relation with his pupils. Upon the whole, 
the contact with college classes is agreeable to a 
man of friendly temperament. He learns to make 
allowance for undergraduate conventionalities, 
and does not expect enthusiasm where enthusi- 
asm would be bad form. On their part, students 
generously overlook the whims and crotchets of 
a favorite professor ; they even pardon his amaze- 
ment at the ways of intercollegiate diplomacy, or 
his radical skepticism as to the intellectual dis- 
cipline involved in football. 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 87 

In one sense, indeed, lie is supposed to know 
very little about the men whom he teaches. The 
in loco parentis theory has long been doomed — 
at least in the larger institutions — and so far as 
direct observation is concerned, the professor is 
as ignorant of what is going on in a student's 
room as if it were in the South seas. But for 
all that he can make skillful guesses, from a hun- 
dred signs, and when the Seniors file upon the 
Commencement platform for their degrees, that 
silent circle of professors often know them better 
than their mothers do. It is pleasant to meet 
these fellows afterward, either on the old cam- 
pus, or at some remote railway junction, or at 
midnight in a foreign city, and pick up for a 
moment the dropped threads of acquaintance. 
Sometimes one learns in these accidental ways 
that his instruction counted for more than was 
apparent at the time; he makes the discovery 
that someone has taken pains to remember words 
that he himself has long forgotten. Herein lies 
half the zest of teaching. One blazes away into 
the underbrush, left barrel and right barrel, 
vaguely enough as it seems, but some of the shots 
are sure to tell. Young men are after all so 



88 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

susceptible to impression, so responsive to right 
feeling, that though the fine reserve of youth may 
not betray it at the moment, they nevertheless 
bear away from their instructor the best he has 
to give them. This may be poor enough, but it 
is something. 

When a professor grows tired of moralizing 
about his colleagues or his pupils, he always has 
the president to fall back upon. So have the 
undergraduates, for that matter, and their pa- 
rents, and the alumni, and the trustees, and the 
general public, — and the newspaper reporters. 
The college president who can conduct himself 
to the satisfaction of this varied body of critics, 
and enjoy at the same time the approval of his 
own conscience, is a gifted man. A president 
must have many qualifications for his office — I 
have heard a cautious observer say — but his first 
need is a thick skin. Undoubtedly, by some wise 
provision of nature, the skin grows thicker with 
exposure, but there is a curiously prevalent im- 
pression that a president's conscience is liable to 
a corresponding induration. A cynical-minded 
friend of mine, of large discourse in these mat- 
ters, avers that such are the temptations peculiar 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 89 

to the office, that of all the college presidents he 
has known, only two remained Christians. These 
two — if I may be permitted to say so without 
discourtesy to the others — are both dead. 

Whatever be the foundation for such impious 
generalizations, no one will deny that an Ameri- 
can college president has a task of extraordinary 
difficulty. Yet his problems have been met, upon 
the whole, with consummate skill. Every type of 
president has done something to advance the 
cause of higher education in America : the sleek 
"promoter," the sectarian fanatic, the close- 
mouthed business manager, the far-sighted educa- 
tor, the blameless clergyman. These types appear 
and disappear and blend, but meantime the great 
cause itself goes lumbering steadily forward. 

Two generations ago, the place held by the 
college professor in the community must have 
vastly tickled his vanity. Those rules in vogue in 
New England, requiring students to doff their 
hats when four rods from a professor (two rods 
only for a tutor, alas !) were emblematic of the 
universal homage paid him in a college town. 
I suppose there is no man so great nowadays, 
even on great occasions, as those old fellows were 



90 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

continuously. Town and college had a solid- 
arity of interest that is now unknown, except 
in a few instances of fortunate survival. The 
commanding position of the professor in the com- 
munity was often a deserved recognition of his 
• services to the local public. Here and there may 
still be found a man of the old type, an agitator 
for all good causes, an orator in town meeting, 
a politician within the bounds of dignity, but it 
is a common complaint among the townspeople 
in academic communities that your modern pro- 
fessor is a Gallio. He may turn out occasionally 
to manifest his interest in some crisis of the 
church or school or state, but in general he sticks 
to his library. This criticism is often short- 
sighted, particularly in reference to politics. The 
professor who patiently teaches his classes, week 
in and week out, to think straight, to see that two 
and two make four on either side of the Atlantic 
and that " stealing will continue stealing," serves 
his country better than a hundred " spell-bind- 
ers " in the last frantic days of a campaign. But 
upon the whole there is ground for the current 
complaint as to the college teacher's unconcern 
for public questions. He remains in one sense a 



THE LIFE OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR 91 

leading figure in his community. There are cer- 
tain things he may not do without losing caste. 
The butcher, with a vague feeling of his impor- 
tance, charges him a couple of extra cents per 
pound, and the suave Armenian refugee, noting 
the real Bokhara on his floor, pockets the pro- 
fessorial gift of two dollars and thinks in his 
Oriental heart that it ought to have been five. 
Yet in these respects he may be a marked man 
— unluckily! — without possessing any of the 
old, real leadership of influence and character. 
Plausible as may be his excuses of preoccupa- 
tion with wider intellectual interests, the tone of 
American civic life has already suffered from his 
indifference. There are indications, however, of 
a reaction against this indolent exclusiveness. It 
may be that the hour of selfish acquisition and 
ungenerous rivalry between the colleges is pass- 
ing, and that side by side they are to strive once 
more, and more effectively than ever, for the com- 
mon welfare. Some such aspiration is certain to 
thrill sooner or later, the loneliest scholar in the 
most secluded corner of the college world ; for 
even the inveterate pedant may possess a " most 
public soul." 



92 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

After all is said, the life of a college professor 
presents, under curious disguises, the old, univer- 
sal issues. It is a noble profession for the noble- 
hearted, and but a petty calling for a man of 
petty mind. 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE 
PUBLIC 



COLLEGE PEOFESSOES AND THE 
PUBLIC 

In a recent number of the Harvard Graduates* 
Magazine there is a sketch entitled " A Harvard 
Ascetic." It describes that singular gentleman 
and scholar, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, 
with whose academic career anecdote and myth 
have long been busy. For some thirty-six years 
after his appointment as Greek tutor, in 1842, 
Professor Sophocles " lived by himself," we are 
told, " in the west entry of Holworthy, and there 
cooked and spread his frugal meals, amid his 
lexicons and papers and exercise books." Whether 
he bred his famous chickens in his sleeping room 
is still a matter for high debate among Cambridge 
humorists of an antiquarian turn. At any rate 
he seems to have lived his own life in serene in- 
difference to contemporary opinion. He preserved 
throughout the most stirring period of the last 
century the spiritual isolation of the exile. He 
remained from first to last a Greek monk, set to 



96 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

the somewhat incongruous task of teaching Amer- 
ican boys. 

I am so unfortunate as never to have known 
Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles. But I have 
often been inclined to moralize upon his monastic 
existence, in comparing it with the fuller if more 
interrupted lives of some of his contemporaries 
and pupils. For there have been many gramma- 
rians quite as anxious as Professor Sophocles to 
" settle Hoti's business " and impart " the doc- 
trine of the enclitic de" who have cheerfully sur- 
rendered their scanty hours for research at the 
call of public service ; arguing in town meetings 
for better schoolhouses and better roads, visiting 
and burying the town poor, securing better terms 
from the all-invading trolley companies, addressing 
legislative committees in behalf of local improve- 
ments, — sparing, in short, no time or labor where 
the expenditure of time and labor might insure 
better conditions of living for the communities 
where the scholar's lot was cast. That this devo- 
tion to the claims of the town or city or general 
public is likely to interfere with Hoti's business 
is undeniable. The doctrine of the enclitic de is 
less clearly defined to-day than it might have 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 97 

been if all college teachers had lived, like Pro- 
fessor Sophocles, in the west entry of a dormitory, 
engrossed with lexicons and exercise books, and 
with a few chickens, possibly, to add speculative 
interest to the scene. There is, one must confess, 
a more or less constant antinomy between the in- 
stincts of pure scholarship and the impulses of 
citizenship. It is a warfare which accounts, at 
least in part, for the peculiar status of the college 
professor under the conditions of contemporary 
American life ; and certain phases of the rather 
complex situation growing out of these contradic- 
tory duties one may venture to discuss. 

Few educated men will deny the imaginative 
charm that invests the existence of the solitary 
scholar. In his person we discover one man, in 
this confusing world, who knows what he likes. 
Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford, who had 

* 'levere have at his beddes heede 
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reede 
Of Aristotle and his philosophie 
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sawtrie," 

is something more than a type of mediaeval devo- 
tion to the Aristotelian logic. Some breath of 
his ascetic spirit still abides in every scholar wor- 



98 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

thy of the name ; the twenty books continue to 
yield to such a man a deeper delight than the 
robes or the fiddle. There is no college faculty 
without its Clerk of Oxenf ord, — some unworldly 
soul who grows old without tangible rewards, 
possibly without very tangible achievements, but 
who has nevertheless kept the pure flame of 
learning alive in his heart. Innocent eccentri- 
cities attach themselves to him. Young doctors 
from the great foreign and American universities 
find him a trifle old-fashioned in his views and 
unaware of the latest dissertations. Yet the 
blameless Clerk loves his twenty books to the 
end. 

One such man I remember in particular. In 
his younger days he had been a Latinist, until 
the loss, by fire, of his manuscript Latin gram- 
mar disheartened him, and he accepted a casual 
offer of a chair of elementary mathematics, which 
he kept till his death. He fulfilled his duties as 
instructor with perfect gravity and fidelity, but 
cared wholly for other things : for his collections 
of Phsedrus and black-letter Chaucers ; for Scott's 
novels, which he used to read through once each 
year; for the elder dramatists; for Montaigne 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 99 

and Lamb. Weather permitting, he drove from 
twenty to forty miles a day in his rusty, mud- 
covered buggy ; he knew every wild flower, every 
lovely or bold view, within reach of Williams- 
town. To be his companion upon one of these 
drives was to touch the very essence of fine, 
whimsical, irresponsible scholarship. But Pro- 
fessor Dodd made no speeches in town meeting, 
was scantily interested in no-license agitation, 
was rather likely to forget election day alto- 
gether, and on pleasant Sundays used to patron- 
ize obscure churches that lay at an extraordinary 
driving distance from home. His sense of freedom 
from these compulsions that are laid upon the 
strenuous citizen of New England was very 
charming. The land of his habitation was " far 
from this our war." 

The type of moral detachment which my old 
friend thus exemplified is not only charming ; it 
is positively necessary, if the work demanded by 
productive scholarship — though he was quite 
frankly an unproductive scholar ! — is adequately 
to be done. It is an encumbrance to the scholar, 
as it is to the soldier, to entangle himself over- 
much with the affairs of this life. Certain mem- 



uic. 



100 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

bers of every academic community seem drafted 
by nature and by achievement to special service. 
They are summoned out of the usual social order, 
away from the conventional, wholesome round of 
ordinary discipline, to lead some forlorn hope of 
science or letters, to explore the farthest bound- 
aries of human knowledge, to chart unknown 
waters that will by and by be crowded with th$ 
funnels of the carrying trade of the world. There 
is a profound sense in which every such man 
must, like Newton, be 

" forever 
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." 

He cannot keep in touch with the normal life of 
other men. If he brings back something to us at 
the end of his voyages, that is enough ; he must 
not be held to rigid attendance upon ward meet- 
ings and Sunday school. The chances are that 
not twenty men in the world will recognize, at 
first, what these explorations mean to human 
progress ; their significance is realized very grad- 
ually. Meantime the man's neighbors will know 
merely that he is gone, — that he is absent- 
minded, forgetful of jury duty and registration 
and a hundred admirable " causes." 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 101 

Since this type of intellectual pioneer is so 
essential to the true progress of the race, there is 
no likelihood that it will not persist. Indeed, 
there are more opportunities open to it and 
greater honors are paid to it to-day, in this coun- 
try, than we have ever offered before. The Clerk 
of Oxenford, who was " not right fat," as it may 
be remembered, in the fourteenth century, is bet- 
ter clothed and fed and housed in the twentieth. 
Yet the college teachers who really make original 
contributions to human knowledge are few in 
proportion to the total numbers engaged in the 
profession. The passion for scholarship, like that 
for poetry, does not always imply a correspond- 
ing power of production; and because we are 
glad to release some picked man from the com- 
mon social obligations and services, and bid him 
Godspeed upon his adventure, it does not follow 
that a similar freedom may be claimed for those 
who stay at home. The solitary scholar will al- 
ways be the exception, not the rule. The college 
professor, under normal conditions, can escape 
neither his duties to the public nor the daily irre- 
sistible impact from the public. His endeavor to 
escape them may be an evidence of instinctive 



102 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

capacity for creative work of the highest value ; 
but it has not infrequently been the badge of a 
mere Bohemianism, a mark of the reckless, self- 
ish existence of an alien, — of a man with no 
stake in the community. 

"I do not often speak to public questions," 
said Emerson, who, without formal academic re- 
lations, was nevertheless in so many ways our 
finest type of academic behavior : " they are odi- 
ous and hurtful, and it seems like meddling or 
leaving your work. I have my own spirits in 
prison, — spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man 
visits if I do not. And then I see what havoc it 
makes with any good mind, a dissipated philan- 
thropy. The one thing not to be forgiven to intel- 
lectual persons is, not to know their own task." 

Yet these serene sentences were uttered at the 
opening of his address on the Fugitive Slave 
Law, and he goes on to say that he never felt 
the crack of the slaveowner's whip until that 
measure, backed as it was by Daniel Webster, 
put a check on his free speech and action. Then, 
with words fairly incandescent with noble scorn, 
Emerson denounces a law which he believes to 
be an outrage alike upon the rights of private 



COLLEGE PROFESSOKS AND THE PUBLIC 103 

citizenship and upon the public honor. That 
speech upon the Fugitive Slave Law deserves to 
be read with the more famous Phi Beta Kappa 
oration of 1837 on the American Scholar. The 
earlier address describes the scholar's duty to- 
ward his work; the speech of 1854 states and 
exemplifies the scholar's duty as a citizen. 

Scarcely half a century has elapsed since these 
later words of Emerson were spoken. Yet what 
far-reaching changes have been wrought in the 
relations of the academic scholar to the public ! 
Many of the most characteristic phases of our 
modern industrial and social development are 
less than half a century old. Within that period 
the curriculum of the American college has been 
transformed. The professor of to-day, instead of 
occupying himself solely with the dead languages 
and a little mathematics and philosophy, pursues 
studies and gives instruction that bring him into 
touch, at a thousand points of contact, with the 
material interests, the practical concerns, of the 
American public. Some Evangelinus Aposto- 
lides Sophocles still trims his solitary lamp in 
every college; and in every college there are 
still, as always, men whose instincts of citizen- 



104 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

ship are wholly independent of the work of their 
particular department. But a newer type of col- 
lege professor is also everywhere in evidence : the 
expert who knows all about railroads and bridges 
and subways; about gas commissions and elec- 
trical supplies; about currency and banking, 
Philippine tariffs, Venezuelan boundary lines, 
the industries of Porto Rico, the classification of 
^ the civil service, the control of trusts. I take my 
illustrations almost at random, and yet in con- 
nection with each topic upon that variegated list 
it would be possible to point to college professors 
who have lately been rendering a signal public 
service. These men combine technical training 
with practical capacity. They can no longer be 
brushed aside contemptuously as "mere theor- 
ists." They are helping to carry forward the de- 
tailed work of governmental departments ; and 
as you and I are paying for their traveling 
expenses and their stenographers, they ought to 
meet every American definition of " the practical 
man"! 

And we must take into account other facts be- 
sides these new professorial activities springing 
out of the new scientific and commercial energy 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 105 

of the nation. This energy has been felt by the 
universities, and it has produced university men 
who, judged by any previous academic stand- 
ards, belong to a new species. But the college 
professor who represents the " humanities " rather 
than the distinctly scientific side of modern edu- 
cation, is likewise brought closer to the public 
than ever before. The newspapers report — and 
misreport — him. Editors offer him space to re- 
ply. Publishers weary him with appeals to write 
text-books. He goes to conventions. He has be- 
come sophisticated. The great festivals of his 
university — like the rural college Commence- 
ments of sixty years ago — assume the character 
of a popular show. The President of the United 
States attends them. The professor's photograph, 
in full academic costume, assaults your eye in the 
market-place. The college press club and the 
university's bureau of publicity give his lecture 
dates in advance. The prospectus of your favor- 
ite magazine bids you inspect his literary qualifi- 
cations as well as his thoughtful countenance. 
WJio's Who in America informs you of the name 
of his second wife. 

In all this familiarity of intercourse with the 



106 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

world, some of the fine old reserve of manner and 
reticence of speech has been lost. The secular- 
ized professor — like one of those gray Italian 
convents now secularized into orphan schools — 
is sometimes rather a noisy, middle-class affair. 
Yet if something of the traditional fastidiousness 
and exclusiveness has disappeared, other quali- 
ties, more robust, and probably more useful, have 
been gained. It has been an advantage to the 
public to see the professor at closer range, and it 
has been a still more obvious benefit to the pro- 
fessor himself that he has found manifold modes 
of contact with his fellow citizens. For the les- 
sons which the professor learns from the public 
are at least as important as those which he imparts. 
If, as the cant phrase has it, he does something 
occasionally to " purify politics," politics pretty 
constantly clarifies him. 

This growth in mutual knowledge between a 
single class in the community and the community 
as a whole has already proved its value, but the 
limits of its usefulness have by no means been 
reached. Popular suspicion of the political theo- 
rist — a suspicion curiously active at the pres- 
ent moment — is still apt to find in the " college 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 107 

professor " a convenient symbol of ineptitude. 
The Philistinism which glorifies the so-called 
" man of action " minimizes by contrast the man 
of thought. Nor is it to be expected that the 
general public can ever develop a full sympathy 
with the academic scholar whose mind is bent 
solely upon discovering the truth. It may respect 
him if he keeps out of the way. But let him once 
lift his voice against some popular movement, 
and the hisses will be prompt enough. Most of 
us can remember the time when college professors 
of economics who advocated tariff for revenue 
were stigmatized as " British emissaries " with 
their pockets stuffed with " British gold." There 
is less said just now about British emissaries, and 
yet the college economist who does not, in football 
parlance, " buy the winning colors after the game" 
must still pay the penalty of his hardihood. Col- 
lege teachers have been openly denounced as 
" traitors " for advocating self-government for 
the Filipinos. In many a pulpit and newspaper 
office, it was declared that the utterances of col- 
lege professors were largely responsible for the 
assassination of President McKinley. Singularly 
enough, the most bitter denunciations of the col- 



108 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

lege professor in politics come from college-trained 
politicians and journalists ; there is no such mas- 
ter of the sneer as the partisan who in his youth 

" did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and saint." 

In short, courage is still necessary if the college 
teacher desires to speak frankly upon disputable 
topics. In 1904 it is easy to be a champion of 
the gold standard, because the gold standard has 
fortunately prevailed ; in 1896 the comfort of 
such a championship depended upon the longitude 
of the college. We are gradually learning to 
analyze the complex elements that enter into the 
question of " academic freedom," and to discover 
that human nature must not be left out of the 
reckoning ; but meantime it must be confessed 
that academic freedom, like the Supreme Court 
in Mr. Dooley's epigram, "follows the election 
returns." 

Yet there is something to be said for that 
instinct of self-preservation which forces the ma- 
jority, in a democracy like ours, to silence demon- 
strative opposition, and proceed with the public 
affairs. One must admit that a good many college 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC JL09 

professors have taken the Irish members of Par- 
liament as their exemplars, and are boyishly 
pleased if they can merely obstruct the business 
of the House. Miss Fanny Burney once wrote 
of Sir Philip Jennings Clerk, " He is a professed 
minority man." This type of man is familiar in 
academic circles. There is something very ad- 
mirable in his bravery, in his consistency, and in 
the Cato-like — the Oxford-like — pride with 
which he clings to lost causes. But, like all of 
us, he needs to discriminate. John Milton, who 
was " a professed minority man " of the most 
militant order, declared that "when God com- 
mands to take the trumpet, and blow a dolorous 
or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what 
he shall say or what he shall conceal." Noble, 
heartening words are these, and as much needed 
now as ever. Yet there should be a reasonable 
certainty that the note is really blown at God's 
command ; and one may concede that the pro- 
fessed minority man of the academic species some- 
times mistakes for the Divine clarion what is 
merely a tin trumpet hanging on the wall of his 
private study, and that he blows it mainly for the 
exercise of his lungs. 



110 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

It is easy to comprehend, and it should be easy 
to pardon, these professorial extravagances. They 
are the excitable utterances of men not habitually 
sobered by practical contact with affairs. Yet an 
excited participation in public debate is better, 
after all, than indifference ; and as the solidarity 
of interests between all classes in the republic 
becomes more generally realized, there is likely 
to be less and less criticism of academic critics. 
While making fullest admission of the occasional 
peevishness and exaggeration of these men, it 
should never be forgotten that no class of Ameri- 
can citizens bring to the discussion of current 
questions so wide a knowledge of the teachings 
of history, a deeper attachment to American 
ideals, and a more disinterested patriotism. 

The field of political activity has been selected 
to illustrate some of the relations of the professor 
with the public, not only because the illustration 
lies conveniently near at hand, but also because 
it is typical of other activities as well. The bene- 
fits that have attended the more general partici- 
pation of college teachers in current politics are 
undeniable. They justify the belief that many of 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 111 

the obstructions which still embarrass the com- 
merce of the professor with the public will disap- 
pear upon better mutual acquaintance. There are 
many spheres of public activity in which college 
teachers need encounter none of the suspicion 
that is bred by partisan politics. In the fight for 
better tenements, for public parks, bath-houses, 
libraries, and training-schools ; in all the varied 
work of philanthropic, ethical, and religious 
organizations ; in the immense task of securing 
and developing throughout this country a respect 
for law, a man is not handicapped because he 
earns his living in a college. He will discover, if 
he makes the effort, that he can come to closer 
quarters with his fellow Americans, not only 
without abandoning any old ideals worth keeping, 
but with the certainty of obtaining an invigorat- 
ing supply of new ideals. His working hours may 
be devoted to investigation or to classroom in- 
struction ; he may hope to influence his generation 
through his pupils or through his books ; but he 
will have at least certain moments of leisure. 
These may be spent, if he will, in widening his 
knowledge of the American people of to-day. 
I have already referred to one delightful Wil- 



112 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

liamstown personage, the late Professor Dodd, as 
an instance of academic detachment. I shall 
choose a phrase descriptive of a more normal 
scheme of life from a remark made about another 
resident of the Berkshire college town, named 
" Kuss " Pratt. He was the one-armed and more 
stupid brother of the half-witted and locally- 
famous "Bill" Pratt. As Russ was reputed 
to be the laziest man in Williamstown, — a vil- 
lage that had many claimants to that distinction, 
— I once asked his adopted daughter how her 
father spent his time. Her answer was epigram- 
matic in its swiftness and scope: "He saws 
wood, sets in the house, and goes down street ! " 
Is not that an admirable formula? Labor, re- 
flection, social contact ! Could there be a wiser 
counsel of perfection for the college professor ? 
Poor fellow, he must " saw wood " or freeze ; yet 
he has some opportunity to reflect, in a world 
which is just now little enough given to reflec- 
tion ; and surely he might " go down street " 
more often and to better advantage than he does. 
The street no less than the library has its whims, 
partialities, extravagances, panics. But the man 
of the library has much to learn from the man of 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 113 

the street, and a riper friendship between them 
will betoken a better service toward their com- 
mon country. 

A friend of James Russell Lowell has said 
that in Lowell's later life he sometimes spoke 
discontentedly of the years he had spent as a col- 
lege professor. He complained humorously that 
he had been wont, in those earlier days, to lec- 
ture for an hour or two, go back to Elmwood, 
fill his pipe, and thank God that he had done a 
day's work. Now it is not easy to say what shall 
constitute a day's work, either for one's self or 
for another ; the question is not so simple as the 
arithmetic of the labor unions would seem to 
imply. Yet that is a scant day's work, whether 
long or short, that does not bring the worker 
into some relation to human progress ; that does 
not make men and women freer, wiser, better. 
Lowell's years of service in the Smith Professor- 
ship may have been as fruitful as any years of 
his life, although it was the nobler side of him, 
no doubt, that made him question it. 

But who knows the pattern into which his days 
and years are being woven ? I remember com- 
plaining, long ago, to a venerable professor, as 



114 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

we were walking together to morning chapel, 
that a required chapel service involved a costly 
expenditure of time; and that the German 
scholars were steadily drawing ahead of their 
American rivals because, for one reason, they 
saved that half hour a day. His reply was very 
fine : " If you are turning a grindstone, every 
moment is precious ; but if you are doing a 
man's work, the inspired moments are precious." 
Every fully endowed man believes that saying in 
his heart, whatever he may think about the spe- 
cific question of compulsory chapel for the col- 
lege-bred ; and as our modern world gradually 
reveals to us both its complexity and its spiritual 
unity, the " inspired moments " are increasingly 
likely to be those, not of lonely intuition, but of 
organized social service. No Americans, above 
all, no body of educated Americans, should 
imagine that they have a charter to live unto 
themselves. The whole contemporary movement 
is against it, — the secularization of knowledge, 
the democratization of society, the fundamental 
oneness of interest among all peoples of this 
swiftly narrowing earth. For the members of 
any profession to insulate themselves from these 



COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND THE PUBLIC 115 

currents of world-sympathy is to cut off that pro- 
fession's power. The astonishing development of 
academic studies in our day, the evolution of 
these new types of professorial activity, the im- 
mense endowments and other evidences of public 
interest in the American college, are fortunate 
auguries for the republic. But they are also wel- 
come because they invite the professor himself to 
make generous contribution to what the Presi- 
dent of Harvard, in speaking at the bicentennial 
of Yale, characterized as " the pervasive, aggres- 
sive, all-modifying spirit of Christian democracy." 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 



HAWTHOENE AT NOETH ADAMS 

The westward-bound passenger on the Fitchburg 
Eailroad, emerging from the long roar of the 
Hoosac Tunnel, sees the smoke-blurred electric 
lamps quenched in sudden daylight, shuts his 
watch, and finds himself in North Adams. The 
commercial travelers leave the car, and a boy- 
comes in with the Troy papers. A grimy station 
hides the close-built town, though upon the left 
one can see row above row of boarding-houses 
clinging to the face of a rocky foothill of Grey- 
lock, and further to the south a bit of meadow 
land not yet covered with railroad sidings. Then 
the train moves on, and in a moment plunges 
into another tunnel, and so out of the Tunnel 
City. 

Thirty years ago, the traveler's first glimpse 
of North Adams was more picturesque. The big 
six-horse coaches, starting from Eice's, away 
over in the winding valley of the Deerfield, and 
climbing Hoosac Mountain, used to swing at full 



120 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

gallop along the two or three miles of tableland 
on the summit of the range, past the queer old 
houses of Florida, the highest township in Mas- 
sachusetts, and pull up for a moment where the 
road turned sharply down the western slope. On 
the right were the last reluctant spurs of the 
Green Mountains; directly in front, over the 
broad Williamstown valley, stretched the clear- 
cut Taconics ; at the left rose the massive lines 
of Greylock. At one's feet, far below, were two 
or three church spires, and the smoke of facto- 
ries. Tiny houses were already perching here 
and there on the steep sides of the mill streams ; 
for North Adams has no site whatever, and from 
the beginning has had to climb for its life. Com- 
pletely enfolded by hills as the village seemed, 
one could yet catch a glimpse, as the driver gath- 
ered up his reins for the long descent, of a val- 
ley extending southward, between Ragged Moun- 
tain and the Hoosac range, toward the towns of 
lower Berkshire. 

It was up this valley, more than half a century 
ago, that the Pittsfield stage brought Hawthorne 
to North Adams. He was taking, in rather aim- 
less fashion, one of those summer outings, which 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 121 

gave him more pleasure, he said, than other 
people had in the whole year beside. Nothing 
drew him to northern Berkshire, apparently, 
except the mere chance of travel ; but he found 
the place congenial, and there are facts con- 
nected with his stay there that throw a clear 
light upon Hawthorne, at a period critical both 
for himself and his art. There are persons still 
living who well remember his sojourn in North 
Adams. His favorite companions were men 
prominent in the little community, and of such 
marked personal qualities that story and legend 
are busy with them to this hour ; so that even if 
the graphic delineations of the American Note- 
Boohs were not at hand, one might still form a 
fairly accurate picture of the North Adams of 
1838. 

Halfway down the straggling main street, upon 
the site of the present Wilson House, was a noted 
inn, called either after its proprietor, Smith's 
Tavern, or according to its politics, the Whig 
Tavern, or else, and more pretentiously, the North 
Adams House. Those were the days of Martin 
Van Buren, and the Democratic, or Waterman 
Tavern, was across the way, on the corner now 



122 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

occupied by the Richmond House. But Haw- 
thorne, though on the very eve of becoming a 
Democratic office-holder, weakly yielded to the 
attractions of the Whig Tavern, being doubtless 
lured by the reputation of Orrin Smith as a 
hotel-keeper. Up to the many-pillared piazza of 
Smith's Tavern drove the stages from Greenfield 
and Pittsfield, from Troy and Albany. The broad 
stoop was the favorite loafing-place of the village 
characters. Here sat mild-mannered Captain 
Carter, with butternut meats and maple sugar 
for sale in little tin measures, which Hawthorne 
has described with curious precision ; and which 
descended, by the way, after the captain's death, 
to a well-known vagrant in the adjoining village 
of Williamstown. Hither hobbled " Uncle John " 
Sheldon, the Revolutionary pensioner. Here was 
to be found the one-armed soap-maker, Daniel 
Haynes, nicknamed " Black Hawk," who had 
once been a lawyer, and had been ruined by 
drink, though there was still " a trace of the gen- 
tleman and man of intellect " in him. And here, 
accompanied by his Newfoundland dog, was the 
brandy-possessed " Doctor Bob " Robinson, a sort 
of fearless and savage Falstaff , the fame of whose 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 123 

single combats and evil ways and miraculous gifts 
of healing lingers even yet in the Tunnel City. 

Along the piazza, or within the hospitable bar- 
room, sat village worthies of a higher grade : 
Otis Hodge the millwright, Orrin Witherell the 
blacksmith, Squire Putnam and Squire Drury 
and the rest, filling their broad-bottomed chairs 
with the dignity acquired by years of habitude. 
Jovial old fellows were these patrons of the Whig 
Tavern, — Rhode Island Baptists, most of them, 
— hard-handed and level-headed, with hearty 
laughs and strongly flavored stories, with coarse 
appetites for meat and drink, and " a tendency 
to obesity." Doubtless they scrutinized each new 
arrival, drew shrewd inferences as to his occupa- 
tion and character, and decided whether he was 
worthy of their intimacy. We do not know their 
first impressions of the young man who stepped 
out of the Pittsfield stage on the 26th of July, 
but there is every evidence that he was strongly 
attracted to these broad-backed tavern-haunters, 
and was promptly initiated into their circle. 
Curiously enough, their new friend was the most 
delicately imaginative genius this country has 
yet produced ; gifted with such elusive qualities, 



124 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

such swift, bright, fairy-like fancies, that his col- 
lege mates had nicknamed him " Oberon ; " so 
shy and solitary that for years he had scarcely 
gone upon the streets of his native town except at 
night ; so modest that he concealed his identity 
as a story-writer under a dozen different signa- 
tures ; with a personal reserve so absolute and 
insistent that no liberty was ever taken with 
him ; beautiful in face and form, fresh-hearted 
and pure-souled. A strange associate, indeed, 
for Orrin Witherell and Otis Hodge, Orrin Smith 
and "Doctor Bob " Robinson ! Ragged, one-armed 
"Black Hawk," soap-boiler and phrenologist, 
stopped in his " wild and ruined and desperate 
talk " to look at the new guest. " My study is 
man," he said. " I do not know your name, but 
there is something of the hawk-eye about you, 
too." And thus the two students of man entered 
into fellowship. 

Hawthorne tarried at the North Adams House 
until the 11th of September. He bathed in the 
pools along Hudson's Brook, and climbed the hills 
at sunset. He chatted on the tavern stoop with 
" Uncle John " Sheldon and with Captain Carter, 
of whose name he was not quite certain, and 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 125 

which he enters in the journal as " I believe, 
Capt. Gavett." On rainy days he sat in the bar- 
room and consorted with Methodistical cattle 
drovers, stage agents, agents for religious and 
abolition newspapers, and an extraordinary va- 
riety of other people. He attended court, the 
menagerie, and the funeral of a child. Some- 
times he took brief excursions in the neighbor- 
hood ; as, for instance, to the Williams Com- 
mencement. Here he might have seen Mark 
Hopkins, presiding for the second time, flanked 
by dignitaries of the church and state ; he might 
have listened to twenty-three orations, upon 
themes of which The Influence of Deductive and 
Inductive Habits on the Character, by William 
Bross, and The Effect of Music on the Feelings, 
by Henry M. Field, are perhaps fair examples, — 
to say nothing of the polished periods of the Eev. 
Orville Dewey's address before the alumni. But, 
as a matter of fact, this conscienceless graduate 
of Bowdoin apparently spent most of his time 
behind the church, watching the peddlers and 
the negroes. The only evidence that he entered 
the big white meeting-house at all is his remark 
that there were well-dressed ladies there, " the 



126 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

sunburnt necks in contiguity with the delicate 
fabrics of the dresses showing the yeoman's 
daughters." 

Some of the people with whom the usually 
taciturn Hawthorne conversed, in the course of 
his walks and drives, made a deep impression 
upon his imagination. Of an old man whose 
children were connected with a circus establish- 
ment, he noted, as Wordsworth might have done, 
" While this old man is wandering among the 
hills, his children are the gaze of multitudes." 
On the top of Hoosac Mountain he met, one day, 
a German Jew, traveling with a diorama. After 
Hawthorne had looked at it, a curious elderly 
dog made his appearance, which the romance- 
writer has described with such extreme fidelity 
as to give Mr. Henry James the impression of a 
" general vacancy in the field of Hawthorne's 
vision," although it will appear that Hawthorne 
knew what he was about. One moonlight night 
he ascended the mountain side, startling the 
lonely watcher by one of those huge lime-kilns 
that then, and for many years, abounded near 
North Adams ; and, going up to the top of the 
kiln, the future author of Ethan Brand gazed 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 127 

down upon the red-hot marble, burning with its 
" bluish, lambent flame." Experiences like this 
were destined to reappear, more or less transformed, 
in his creative work; but often the incidents 
recorded in the journal are of the very simplest 
character, as, for instance, the fact that two little 
girls, bearing tin pails, who met him on the Notch 
road, " whispered one another and smiled." 

North Adams is a strange place, after all, to 
find Oberon in, — Oberon, the king of the fairies. 
We are not likely to understand the secret of 
Hawthorne's stay there unless we remember that 
the summer of 1838 was the most important 
epoch of his life. 

What is first to be observed in the North 
Adams portion of the American Note-Boohs is 
the professional point of view. The writer is an 
artist in search of material. " Conceive some- 
thing tragical to be talked about," he adds, after 
describing the old man whose children were in 
the circus, "and much might be made of this 
interview in a wild road among the hills." He 
notes elsewhere : " A little boy named Joe, who 
haunts about the bar-room and the stoop, four 
years old, in a thin, short jacket, and full-breeched 



128 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

trousers, and bare feet. . . . Take this boy as 
the germ of a tavern-haunter, a country roue, to 
spend a wild and brutal youth, ten years of his 
prime in the state prison, and his old age in the 
poorhouse." Thus generously does the Hawthorne 
who himself haunts the Whig Tavern suggest to 
that other Hawthorne who invents stories that he 
might " take this boy." The suggestion was 
adopted, though Joe was not made to run through 
the melancholy course so vividly outlined for 
him ; and readers of the JVote-Books, who have 
wondered what ever became of the little fellow, — 
whose real name was not Joe, but Edward, — 
will doubtless be glad to learn that he grew up 
to be an eminently respectable citizen, and moved 
West ! But the paragraph about Joe is a typical 
one. 

Hawthorne was thirty-four years old that sum- 
mer, and for a dozen years had devoted himself, 
in a solitary and more or less ineffective way, to 
the art of fiction. A gentleman who well remem- 
bers his sojourn at the North Adams House says 
that he used to walk along the street with his 
eyes down, and that he presented the tavern- 
keeper's niece with a book he had written. This 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 129 

book, published the year before, was Twice- Told 
Tales. In Hawthorne's well-known criticism 
upon these stories, written many years afterward, 
he accounted for their negative character — " the 
pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired 
a shade 9 ' — by his way of life while composing 
them. It had been a hermit life, a life of shadows, 
yet now and then of almost pathetic grasping 
after realities. The articles in Twice-Told Tales 
which pleased the author best were those elabo- 
rate exercises in description, valuable indeed as 
illustration of the accuracy of Hawthorne's self- 
training in detailed observation, but more valua- 
ble as evidences of his struggle to turn from his 
air-drawn fancies, and morbid though often ex- 
tremely powerful imaginings, to the common 
sunshine, the trivial sweet realities of the actual 
world. 

Now, the author of the North Adams journal 
is the Hawthorne of the Toll-Gatherer's Day 
and Little Annie's Ramble, rather than the Haw- 
thorne of the Prophetic Pictures and Fancy's 
Show Box. He turns eagerly to the life about 
him ; he notes its details with fascinated interest. 
Nothing comes amiss to him ; the long valley of 



130 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

the Notch, as it sweeps up to the Bellowspipe, 
and a grunting drove of pigs passing the tavern 
at dusk, are alike entered in his note-book. Fifty 
years before the preface to Pierre et Jean was 
written, here was a young man in an obscure 
corner of Massachusetts practicing a " theory of 
observation " which would have satisfied De Mau- 
passant himself. The extraordinary precision of 
Hawthorne's descriptions thus early in his career 
can be fully appreciated only by one who discovers 
how a mere line from the Note-Books will to-day 
serve, with the older citizens of North Adams, to 
identify the village characters sketched therein ; 
or by one who will stand, with Hawthorne's 
words before him, by the side of Hudson's Brook, 
or on the desolate summit of Bald Mountain, or 
at that point on the Notch road where there is a 
view of Williamstown, " with high, mountainous 
swells heaving themselves up, like immense sub- 
siding waves, far and wide around it." 

There was a reason for this passion for the 
outer world. Solitude had done its utmost for 
Hawthorne, at least for the time being, and he 
had come to a parting of the ways. A single 
sentence from a letter to an intimate friend in 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 131 

1838 is like a cry from the man's inmost soul, — 
" I want to have something to do with the material 
world." Wedged in between Otis Hodge and 
Orrin Witherell around the huge fire in the pub- 
lic room of the Whig Tavern, his elbows touching 
those stout-built, cheery-souled embodiments of 
pioneer virtues and vices, and casting himself 
into the life of the village in all its varied activi- 
ties, Hawthorne found the " material world " with 
which he longed to come in touch. When he left 
North Adams, it was to enter almost at once upon 
the life of a weigher and gauger in the Boston 
Custom House, and to stand thenceforth in the 
ranks with his fellow-men. 

But Hawthorne's new contact with actualities 
was something more than a mere quickening of 
interests, a broadening of his range, a closer fo- 
cusing of his professional eye upon the object. 
He was a writer ; he had the passion for observ- 
ing, recording,recombining ; he could not help it. 
It may well be that when such a man throws him- 
self upon the actual, the result is simply a keener 
physical vision, a more perfect analysis, a more 
pitiless art. This fate was quite possible for 
Hawthorne. The fear of it haunted him, and 



132 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

never more so than in this very year when he 
made his escape from it. He wrote to Longfel- 
low, " There is no fate in this world so horrible 
as to have no share in its joys and sorrows." To 
the mere observer as well as to the mere dreamer 
— and Hawthorne had been both by turns — 
may come that paralysis which lays hold of the 
very roots of life and art together ; which begins 
in artistic detachment, and ends in the sterility 
of isolation. From the horror of that death in 
life, which has fallen in our day upon artists like 
Flaubert and his more brilliant nephew, Haw- 
thorne was saved, as he believed, by the influence 
of the woman who afterward became his wife. 
In his own simple phrase, his heart was touched. 
" I used to think I could imagine all passions, all 
feelings and states of the heart and mind, but 
how little did I know ! Indeed, we are but shad- 
ows ; we are not endowed with real life ; and all 
that seems most real about us is but the thinnest 
substance of a dream till the heart be touched. 
That touch creates us ; then we begin to be ; 
thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of 
eternity." 

Hawthorne had already felt that creative touch 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 133 

in the summer of 1838. It accounts — does it 
not ? — for the new sense of reality so apparent 
in the journal. It was not simply his artistic 
interest, but his sympathy, that started into a 
quicker life. His extraordinarily sensitive mind 
brooded upon the risk he had run of becoming a 
cool observer, untaught that he had a heart ; it 
became, in his own words, " a fearful thought " 
to him, and, being an artist to the finger-tips, he 
put his fearful thought into artistic form. In 
Ethan Brand,the story of the man who committed 
the Unpardonable Sin, Hawthorne embodied not 
only his North Adams character studies, but the 
very emotion that must have stirred his deepest 
heart during those weeks of sojourn at the Whig 
Tavern. He laid upon the shoulders of the lime- 
burner on the slope of Hoosac the awful burden 
whose weight he himself had almost felt. 

Ethan Brand, a Chapter from an Abortive 
Romance, was first published in the Dollar Maga- 
zine under the title of The Unpardonable Sin, in 
1851. The date of its composition is uncertain. 
Mr. Lathrop thinks that Hawthorne's removal to 
Berkshire in 1850 may have revived his interest 
in the old material provided by the Note-Boohs j 



134 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

Mr. Conway is inclined to believe that the story- 
was written in 1848. Nor is it clear how literally 
the subtitle is to be taken. There are allusions 
in Ethan Brand to preceding episodes connected 
with the theme, of such dramatic possibilities 
that Hawthorne may well have sketched them in 
his fancy, but whether he ever seriously tried his 
hand upon anything more than the culminating 
chapter is doubtful. Two things, however, are 
certain : for the setting of the story, its author 
drew exclusively upon notes taken in North 
Adams; and the moral problem involved in it 
was Hawthorne's own problem, as a man and an 
artist, in the summer of 1838. Remembering 
how long he brooded over the Septimius Felton 
theme and the Scarlet Letter theme before writ- 
ing a word, it will not seem improbable that the 
conception of Ethan Brand should date from 
the time of his first visit to Berkshire, even if the 
story remained unwritten for a dozen years; 
though, as a matter of fact, it is not at all un- 
likely that its composition is to be placed much 
earlier than the critics have surmised. 

Ostensibly a fragment, and undoubtedly bear- 
ing internal evidence of some haste or dissatis- 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 135 

faction on the author's part, Ethan Brand remains 
one of the most powerful things that Hawthorne 
ever wrote. Rarely has he shown such dramatic 
instinct as when he marshaled his old North 
Adams acquaintances into the moonshine and 
narrow streaks of firelight that illuminated the 
open space before the lime-kiln on the sombre 
mountain side. They are all there : the stage 
agent, the crippled soap-boiler, the brandy-pos- 
sessed doctor, the old man whose daughter had 
wandered away with the circus, the German Jew 
with his diorama, and the curious old dog. It is 
little Joe who guides them into the presence of 
their former associate, Ethan Brand, who has 
committed " the one only crime for which Heaven 
can afford no mercy." Many notes from the 
journal are adopted without change. Sometimes 
there is a mere shifting of descriptive phrases 
that seem to suit Hawthorne's fancy ; as when 
the " wild and ruined and desperate talk " attri- 
buted in the Note-Boohs to the cripple is here 
given to the doctor ; or the sentence " Earth was 
so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream to 
look at it," originally written of Williamstown, 
is applied to the village of the tale. But there 



136 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

are more subtle adaptations of his material in 
two allusions to events not narrated in the story 
itself, however definitely Hawthorne may have 
outlined them in his imagination. The old man's 
missing daughter has become " the Esther of our 
tale," " whom with such cold and remorseless pur- 
pose Ethan Brand had made the subject of a 
psychological experiment." Reference is also 
made to " a professional visit of the village doctor 
to Ethan Brand, during the latter's supposed 
insanity." Hawthorne has perhaps wrought out 
the psychological experiment motive often enough 
elsewhere to indicate what would probably have 
been his method here ; but the idea of bringing 
" Doctor Bob," with his huge animalism and 
mordant humor, " savage as a wild beast and 
miserable as a lost soul," to minister to the spir- 
itual malady that preyed upon Ethan Brand, might 
easily have resulted in a scene unmatched in the 
whole range of Hawthorne's work. 

If it is a pure bit of romanticism to transform 
the Jew of Hoosac Mountain to " the Jew of 
Nuremberg," the mask of the fiend himself, there 
is, on the other hand, in the description of the 
antics of the old dog an instance of the power of 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 137 

Hawthorne's realism. In the Note-Books^ the 
trivial incident of the dog's chasing his own tail 
is minutely narrated, as a fact somehow worth 
recording. In Ethan Brand, the fact is nothing 
except as it illustrates a truth : the man who had 
chased the world over for something that was in 
his own breast, " moved by a perception of some 
remote analogy between his own case and that of 
the self-pursuing cur," broke into the awful laugh 
that sent the jovial party hurrying homewards 
through the darkening woods. 

For Ethan Brand himself there is no model in 
the journal. None was needed. Hawthorne's own 
problem, in that critical year, was to keep " the 
counterpoise between his mind and heart." The 
doom he dreaded most of all was, to be " no longer 
a brother man, opening the chambers or the dun- 
geons of our common nature by the key of holy 
sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all 
its secrets," but to be, like Ethan Brand, " a cold 
observer, looking on mankind as the subject of 
his experiment." The scene of the tale is the very 
hillside where Hawthorne wandered, brooding 
over the isolation that kills and the touch that 
makes alive. Its personages are the people that 



138 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

jostled against him in the tavern. But Hawthorne 
found Ethan Brand — or a potential Ethan Brand 
— in his own heart. He believed in an Unpar- 
donable Sin ; and it is by this faith in the reality 
of the moral life, after all is said, that he takes 
his rank as an artist. He chose moral problems, 
the truths of the human heart, and made them 
plastic ; he created, not abstract types, but men 
and women, charging them with spiritual force ; 
and the result is that Ethan Brand, with his 
homely garments and heavy shoes, bending over 
the fiery lime-kiln on the slope of Hoosac, is a 
figure with all the moral passion, the tragic dig- 
nity, of Empedocles of old casting himself despair- 
ingly into the crater of Mount Etna. 

It is more than fifty years since Hawthorne 
left the village at the foot of Greylock, never to 
return. Most of the companions of his sojourn 
there lie buried in the cone-shaped sand-hills of 
the crowded cemetery just beyond the Little 
Tunnel. The Whig Tavern changed hands shortly 
after his departure ; and although Orrin Smith 
later kept another hostelry by the side of the old 
coaching road on the crest of Hoosac, that, too, 
has long since disappeared, and the site is over- 



HAWTHORNE AT NORTH ADAMS 139 

grown with alders. But within ten minutes' walk 
of the Tunnel City may still be seen a gray lime- 
kiln upon which Hawthorne's eyes have rested, 
and the intense personal emotion of that long-past 
year is still vibrant in Ethan Brand. The ro- 
mance-writers of our day have learned to stray 
far afield in their search for material, and they 
come back, too often, with such empty hands! 
The more 's the pity, since a factory village, set in 
a narrow space among New England hills, was 
once field enough for a Hawthorne. 



FISHING WITH A WOEM 



FISHING WITH A WORM. 

" The last fish I caught was with a worm." — Izaak 
Walton. 

A defective logic is the born fisherman's por- 
tion. He is a pattern of inconsistency. He does 
the things which he ought not to do, and he leaves 
undone the things which other people think he 
ought to do. He observes the wind when he 
should be sowing, and he regards the clouds, with 
tempation tugging familiarly at his heartstrings, 
when he might be grasping the useful sickle. It 
is a wonder that there is so much health in him. 
A sorrowing political economist remarked to me 
in early boyhood, as a jolly red-bearded neighbor, 
followed by an abnormally fat dog, sauntered 
past us for his nooning : " That man is the best 
carpenter in town, but he will leave the most 
important job whenever he wants to go fishing." 
I stared at the sinful carpenter, who swung along 
leisurely in the May sunshine, keeping just ahead 
of his dog. To leave one's job in order to go 
fishing ! How illogical ! 



144 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

Years bring the reconciling mind. The world 
grows big enough to include within its scheme 
both the instructive political economist and the 
truant mechanic. But that trick of truly logical 
behavior seems harder to the man than to the 
child. For example, I climbed up to my den 
under the eaves last night — a sour, black sea- 
fog lying all about, and the December sleet crack- 
ling against the window-panes — in order to 
varnish a certain fly-rod. Now rods ought to be 
put in order in September, when the fishing closes, 
or else in April, when it opens. To varnish a rod 
in December proves that one possesses either a 
dilatory or a childishly anticipatory mind. But 
before uncorking the varnish bottle, it occurred 
to me to examine a dog-eared, water-stained 
fly-book, to guard against the ravages of pos- 
sible moths. This interlude proved fatal to the 
varnishing. A half hour went happily by in 
rearranging the flies. Then, with a fisherman's 
lack of sequence, as I picked out here and there 
a plain snell-hook from the gaudy feathered 
ones, I said to myself with a generous glow at 
the heart : " Fly-fishing has had enough sacred 
poets celebrating it already. Is n't there a good 



FISHING WITH A WORM 145 

deal to be said, after all, for fishing with a 
worm ? " 

Could there be a more illogical proceeding? 
And here follows the treatise, — a Defense of 
Kesults, an Apology for Opportunism, — con- 
ceived in agreeable procrastination, devoted to 
the praise of the inconsequential angleworm, and 
dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling 
carpenter and his fat dog. 

Let us face the worst at the very beginning. 
It shall be a shameless example of fishing under 
conditions that make the fly a mockery. Take 
the Taylor Brook, "between the roads," on the 
headwaters of the Lamoille. The place is a jun- 
gle. The swamp maples and cedars were felled a 
generation ago, and the tops were trimmed into 
the brook. The alders and moosewood are higher 
than your head ; on every tiny knoll the fir bal- 
sams have gained a footing, and creep down, im- 
penetrable, to the edge of the water. In the open 
spaces the Joe-Pye weed swarms. In two minutes 
after leaving the upper road you have scared a 
mink or a rabbit, and you have probably lost the 
brook. Listen ! It is only a gurgle here, droning 
along, smooth and dark, under the tangle of cedar- 



146 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

tops and the shadow of the balsams. Follow the 
sound cautiously. There, beyond the Joe-Pye 
weed, and between the stump and the cedar-top, 
is a hand's breadth of black water. Fly-casting 
is impossible in this maze of dead and living 
branches. Shorten your line to two feet, or even 
less, bait your hook with a worm, and drop it 
gingerly into that gurgling crevice of water. Be- 
fore it has sunk six inches, if there is not one 
of those black-backed, orange-bellied, Taylor 
Brook trout fighting with it, something is wrong 
with your worm or with you. For the trout are 
always there, sheltered by the brushwood that 
makes this half mile of fishing " not worth while." 
Below the lower road the Taylor Brook becomes 
uncertain water. For half a mile it yields only 
fingerlings, for no explainable reason ; then there 
are two miles of clean fishing through the deep 
woods, where the branches are so high that you 
can cast a fly again if you like, and there are 
long pools, where now and then a heavy fish will 
rise; then comes a final half mile through the 
alders, where you must wade, knee to waist deep, 
before you come to the bridge and the river. 
Glorious fishing is sometimes to be had here, — 



FISHING WITH A WORM 147 

especially if you work down the gorge at twi- 
light, casting a white miller until it is too dark 
to see. But alas, there is a well-worn path along 
the brook, and often enough there are the very 
footprints of the " fellow ahead of you," signs as 
disheartening to the fisherman as ever were the 
footprints on the sand to Robinson Crusoe. 

But " between the roads " it is " too much 
trouble to fish ; " and there lies the salvation of 
the humble fisherman who disdains not to use 
the crawling worm, nor, for that matter, to crawl 
himself, if need be, in order to sneak under the 
boughs of some overhanging cedar that casts a 
perpetual shadow upon the sleepy brook. Lying 
here at full length, with no elbow-room to manage 
the rod, you must occasionally even unjoint your 
tip, and fish with that, using but a dozen inches 
of line, and not letting so much as your eyebrows 
show above the bank. Is it a becoming attitude 
for a middle-aged citizen of the world ? That de- 
pends upon how the fish are biting. Holing a put 
looks rather ridiculous also, to the mere observer, 
but it requires, like brook-fishing with a tip only, 
a very delicate wrist, perfect tactile sense, and a 
fine disregard of appearances. 



148 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

There are some fishermen who always fish as 
if they were being photographed. The Taylor 
Brook " between the roads " is not for them. To 
fish it at all is back-breaking, trouser-tearing 
work ; to see it thoroughly fished is to learn new 
lessons in the art of angling. To watch R., for 
example, steadily filling his six-pound creel from 
that unlikely stream, is like watching Sargent 
paint a portrait. R. weighs two hundred and ten. 
Twenty years ago he was a famous amateur 
pitcher, and among his present avocations are 
violin playing, which is good for the wrist, taxi- 
dermy, which is good for the eye, and shooting 
woodcock, which before the days of the new Na- 
ture Study used to be thought good for the whole 
man. E. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint of 
passing his summers near brooks where fly-fishing 
is impossible, he has become a stout-hearted 
apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most 
singular. It consists of a very long, cheap rod, 
stout enough to smash through bushes, and with 
the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the 
butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge 
extra butt of bamboo, which E. carries uncon- 
cernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to fish the 



FISHING WITH A WORM 149 

lower end of a ripple, E. simply locks his reel, 
slips on the extra butt, and there is a fourteen- 
foot rod ready for action. He fishes with a line 
unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too 
big ; and when a trout jumps for that hook, E. 
wastes no time in manoeuvring for position. The 
unlucky fish is simply " derricked," — to borrow 
a word from Theodore, most saturnine and pro- 
fane of Moosehead guides. 

" Shall I play him awhile ? " shouted an excited 
sportsman to Theodore, after hooking his first 
big trout. 

" no! "growled Theodore in disgust. "Just 

derrick him right into the canoe! " A heroic 
method, surely ; though it once cost me the best 
square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had for- 
gotten the landing-net, and the gut broke in his 
fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard. But 
with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor 
Brook, derricking is a safer procedure. Indeed, 
I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a log, 
after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen 
the mighty E. wade downstream close behind me, 
adjust that comical extra butt, and jerk a couple 
of half-pound trout from under tlie very log on 



150 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

which I was sitting. His device on this occasion, 
as I well remember, was to pass his hook but 
once through the middle of a big worm, let the 
worm sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at 
his leisure. The trout could not resist. 

Once, and once only, have I come near equal- 
ing R.'s record, and the way he beat me then is 
the justification for a whole philosophy of worm- 
fishing. We were on this very Taylor Brook, and 
at five in the afternoon both baskets were two 
thirds full. By count I had just one more fish 
than he. It was raining hard. " You fish down 
through the alders,' ' said R. magnanimously. 
" I '11 cut across and wait for you at the sawmill. 
I don't want to get any wetter, on account of my 
rheumatism." 

This was rather barefaced kindness, — for 
whose rheumatism was ever the worse for an- 
other hour's fishing ? But I weakly accepted it. 
I coveted three or four good trout to top off with, 
— that was all. So I tied on a couple of flies, 
and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep 
in the rapidly rising water, down the long green 
tunnel under the curving boughs. The brook 
fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but 



FISHING WITH A WORM 151 

when did one fail to get at least three or four 
trout out of this best half mile of the lower brook ? 
Yet I had no luck. I tried one fly after another, 
and then, as a forlorn hope, — - though it some- 
times has a magic of its own, — I combined a 
brown hackle for the tail fly with a twisting worm 
on the dropper. Not a rise ! I thought of R. 
sitting patiently in the saw mill, and I fished 
more conscientiously than ever. 

" Venture as warily, use the same skill, 
Do your best, whether winning or losing it, 
If you choose to play ! — is my principle. " 

Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy 
of the trout brook murmur themselves over and 
over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky 
day, brought now no consolation. There was sim- 
ply not one fish to be had, to any fly in the book, 
out of that long, drenching, darkening tunnel. 
At last I climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. 
R. was sitting on the fence, his neck and ears 
carefully turtled under his coat collar, the smoke 
rising and the rain dripping from the inverted 
bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be worrying 
about his rheumatism. 
"What luck?" he asked. 



152 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

" None at all," I answered morosely. " Sorry 
to keep you waiting." 

" That 's all right," remarked E. " What do 
you think I 've been doing ? I 've been fishing 
out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. 
There was a patch of floating sawdust there, — 
kind of unlikely place for trout, anyway, — but I 
thought I'd put on a worm and let him crawl 
around a little." He opened his creel as he spoke. 

" But I did n't look for a pair of 'em," he added. 
And there, on top of his smaller fish, were as 
pretty a pair of three-quarter-pound brook trout 
as were ever basketed. 

" I 'm afraid you got pretty wet," said E. 
kindly. 

" I don't mind that," I replied. And I did n't. 
What I minded was the thought of an hour's vain 
wading in that roaring stream, whipping it with fly 
after fly, while E., the foreordained fisherman, 
was sitting comfortably in a sawmill, and der- 
ricking that pair of three-quarter-pounders in 
through the window ! I had ventured more warily 
than he, and used, if not the same skill, at least 
the best skill at my command. My conscience 
was clear, but so was his ; and he had had the 



FISHING WITH A WORM 153 

drier skin and the greater magnanimity and the 
biggest fish besides. There is much to be said, in 
a world like ours, for taking the world as you find 
it and for fishing with a worm. 

One's memories of such fishing, however agree- 
able they may be, are not to be identified with a 
defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the most 
effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete re- 
collection of some brook that could be fished best 
or only in that way, or the image of a particular 
trout that yielded to the temptation of an angle- 
worm after you had flicked fly after fly over him 
in vain. Indeed, half the zest of brook fishing is 
in your campaign for " individuals," — as the 
Salvation Army workers say, — not merely for a 
basketful of fish qua fish, but for a series of indi- 
vidual trout which your instinct tells you ought 
to lurk under that log or be hovering in that rip- 
ple. How to get him, by some sportsmanlike pro- 
cess, is the question. If he will rise to some fly 
in your book, few fishermen will deny that the 
fly is the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, lur- 
ing, beautiful toy, light as thistle-down, falling 
where you will it to fall, holding when the leader 



154 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the 
artificial fly represents the poetry of angling. 
Given the gleam of early morning on some wide 
water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he 
curves and plunges, with the fly holding well, 
with the right sort of rod in your fingers, and the 
right man in the other end of the canoe, and you 
perceive how easy is that Emersonian trick of 
making the pomp of emperors ridiculous. 

But angling's honest prose, as represented by 
the lowly worm, has also its exalted moments. 
" The last fish I caught was with a worm," says 
the honest Walton, and so say I. It was the last 
evening of last August. The dusk was settling 
deep upon a tiny meadow, scarcely ten rods from 
end to end. The rank bog grass, already drenched 
with dew, bent over the narrow, deep little brook 
so closely that it could not be fished except with 
a double-shotted, baited hook, dropped delicately 
between the heads of the long grasses. Under- 
neath this canopy the trout were feeding, taking 
the hook with a straight downward tug, as they 
made for the hidden bank. It was already twi- 
light when I began, and before I reached the 
black belt of woods that separated the meadow 



FISHING WITH A WORM 155 

from the lake, the swift darkness of the North 
Country made it impossible to see the hook. A 
short half hour's fishing only, and behold nearly 
twenty good trout derricked into a basket until 
then sadly empty. Your rigorous fly-fisherman 
would have passed that grass-hidden brook in 
disdain, but it proved a treasure for the humble. 
Here, indeed, there was no question of individu- 
ally-minded fish, but simply a neglected brook, 
full of trout which could be reached with the 
baited hook only. In more open brook-fishing it 
is always a fascinating problem to decide how to 
fish a favorite pool or ripple, for much depends 
upon the hour of the day, the light, the height of 
water, the precise period of the spring or summer. 
But after one has decided upon the best theoreti- 
cal procedure, how often the stupid trout prefers 
some other plan ! And when you have missed a fish 
that you counted upon landing, what solid satis- 
faction is still possible for you, if you are philoso- 
pher enough to sit down then and there, eat your 
lunch, smoke a meditative pipe, and devise a new 
campaign against that particular fish! To get 
another rise from him after lunch is a triumph of 
diplomacy ; to land him is nothing short of states- 



156 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

manship. For sometimes he will jump furiously 
at a fly, for very devilishness, without ever mean- 
ing to take it, and then, wearying suddenly of 
his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a grass- 
hopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an 
extraordinary variety of crawling things, as all 
fishermen know who practice the useful habit of 
opening the first two or three fish they catch, to 
see what food is that day the favorite. But here, 
as elsewhere in this world, the best things lie 
nearest, and there is no bait so killing, week in 
and week out, as your plain garden or golf -green 
angleworm. 

Walton's list of possible worms is impressive, 
and his directions for placing them upon the 
hook have the placid completeness that belonged 
to his character. Yet in such matters a little non- 
conformity may be encouraged. No two men or 
boys dig bait in quite the same way, though all 
share, no doubt, the singular elation which gilds 
that grimy occupation with the spirit of romance. 
The mind is really occupied, not with the wrig- 
gling red creatures in the lumps of earth, but 
with the stout fish which each worm may capture, 
just as a saint might rejoice in the squalor of this 



FISHING WITH A WOKM 157 

world as a preparation for the glories of the world 
to come. Nor do any two experienced fishermen 
hold quite the same theory as to the best mode of 
baiting the hook. There are a hundred ways, 
each of them good. As to the best hook for 
worm-fishing, you will find dicta in every cata- 
logue of fishing tackle, but size and shape and 
tempering are qualities that should vary with the 
brook, the season, and the fisherman. Should 
one use a three-foot leader, or none at all ? Whose 
rods are best for bait-fishing, granted that all of 
them should be stiff enough in the tip to lift a 
good fish by dead strain from a tangle of brush 
or logs ? Such questions, like those pertaining to 
the boots or coat which one should wear, the style 
of bait-box one should carry, or the brand of to- 
bacco best suited for smoking in the wind, are 
topics for unending discussion among the serious 
minded around the camp-fire. Much edification 
is in them, and yet they are but prudential max- 
ims after all. They are mere moralities of the 
Franklin or Chesterfield variety, counsels of 
worldly wisdom, but they leave the soul untouched. 
A man may have them at his finger's ends and 
be no better fisherman at bottom; or he may, 



158 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

like R., ignore most of the admitted rules and 
come home with a full basket. It is a sufficient 
defense of fishing with a worm to pronounce the 
truism that no man is a complete angler until he 
has mastered all the modes of angling. Lovely- 
streams, lonely and enticing, but impossible to 
fish with a fly, await the fisherman who is not 
too proud to use, with a man's skill, the same 
unpretentious tackle which he began with as a 
boy. 

But ah, to fish with a worm, and then not catch 
your fish ! To fail with a fly is no disgrace : your 
art may have been impeccable, your patience 
faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm- 
fishing is that of Results, of having something 
tangible in your basket when the day's work is 
done. It is a plea for Compromise, for cutting 
the coat according to the cloth, for taking the 
world as it actually is. The fly-fisherman is a 
natural Foe of Compromise. He throws to the 
trout a certain kind of lure ; an they will take 
it, so ; if not, adieu. He knows no middle path. 

" This high man, aiming at a million, 
Misses an unit." 



FISHING WITH A WORM 159 

The raptures and the tragedies of consistency- 
are his. He is a scorner of the ground. All honor 
to him ! When he comes back at nightfall and 
says happily, " I have never cast a line more per- 
fectly than I have to-day," it is almost indecent 
to peek into his creel. It is like rating Colonel 
Newcome by his bank account. 

But the worm-fisherman is no such proud and 
isolated soul. He is a " low man " rather than a 
high one ; he honestly cares what his friends will 
think when they look into his basket to see what 
he has to show for his day's sport. He watches 
the Foe of Compromise men go stumbling forward 
and superbly falling, while he, with less inflexible 
courage, manages to keep his feet. He wants to 
score, and not merely to give a pretty exhibition 
of base-running. At the Harvard- Yale football 
game of 1903 the Harvard team showed superior 
strength in rushing the ball ; they carried it almost 
to the Yale goal line repeatedly, but they could 
not, for some reason, take it over. In the instant 
of absolute need, the Yale line held, and when 
the Yale team had to score in order to win, they 
scored. As the crowd streamed out of the Sta- 
dium, a veteran Harvard alumnus said : " This 



160 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

news will cause great sorrow in one home I know 
of, until they learn by to-morrow's papers that 
the Harvard team acquitted itself creditably" 
Exactly. Given one team bent upon acquitting 
itself creditably, and another team determined to 
win, which will be victorious ? The stay-at-homes 
on the Yale campus that day were not curious to 
know whether their team was acquitting itself 
creditably, but whether it was winning the game. 
Every other question than that was to those young 
Philistines merely a fine-spun irrelevance. They 
took the Cash and let the Credit go. 

There is much to be said, no doubt, for the 
Harvard veteran's point of view. The proper 
kind of credit may be a better asset for eleven 
boys than any championship ; and to fish a bit of 
water consistently and skillfully, with your best 
flies and in your best manner, is perhaps achieve- 
ment enough. So says the Foe of Compromise, 
at least. But the Yale spirit will be prying into 
the basket in search of fish ; it prefers concrete 
results. If all men are by nature either Plato- 
nists or Aristotelians, fly-fishermen or worm-fish- 
ermen, how difficult it is for us to do one another 
justice ! Differing in mind, in aim and method, 



FISHING WITH A WORM 161 

how shall we say infallibly that this man or thai 
is wrong ? To fail with Plato for companion may 
be better than to succeed with Aristotle. But one 
thing is perfectly clear : there is no warrant for 
Compromise but in Success. Use a worm if you 
will, but you must have fish to show for it, if you 
would escape the finger of scorn. If you find 
yourself camping by an unknown brook, and are 
deputed to catch the necessary trout for break- 
fast, it is wiser to choose the surest bait. The 
crackle of the fish in the frying-pan will atone 
for any theoretical defect in your method. But 
to choose the surest bait, and then to bring back 
no fish, is unforgivable. Forsake Plato if you must, 
— but you may do so only at the price of justi- 
fying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian arith- 
metic. The college president who abandoned his 
college in order to run a cotton mill was free to 
make his own choice of a calling ; but he was 
never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one 
is bound to be a low man rather than an impracti- 
cal idealist, he should at least make sure of his 
vulgar success. 

Is all this but a disguised defense of pot-hunt- 
ing? No. There is no possible defense of pot- 



162 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

hunting, whether it be upon a trout brook or in 
the stock market. Against fish or men, one should 
play the game fairly. Yet for that matter some 
of the most skillful fly-fishermen I have known 
were pot-hunters at heart, and some of the most 
prosaic - looking merchants were idealists com- 
pared to whom Shelley was but a dreaming boy. 
All depends upon the spirit with which one makes 
his venture. I recall a boy of five who gravely 
watched his father tramp off after rabbits, — gun 
on shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he 
shouldered a wooden sword, and dragging his 
reluctant black kitten by a string, sallied forth 
upon the dusty Vermont road " to get a lion for 
breakfast." That is the true sporting temper ! 
Let there be but a fine idealism in the quest, and 
the particular object is unessential. " A true fish- 
erman's happiness," says Mr. Cleveland, " is not 
dependent upon his luck." It depends upon his 
heart. 

No doubt all amateur fishing is but " play," — 
as the psychologists soberly term it : not a neces- 
sary, but a freely assumed activity, born of sur- 
plusage of vitality. Nobody, not even a carpenter 
wearied of his job, has to go fishing unless he 



FISHING WITH A WORM 163 

wants to. He may indeed find himself breakfast- 
less in camp, and obliged to betake himself to the 
brook, — but then he need not have gone into the 
woods at all. Yet if he does decide to fish, let 
him 

u Venture as warily, use the same skill, 
Do his best, ..." 

whatever variety of tackle he may choose. He 
can be a whole-souled sportsman with the poorest 
equipment, or a mean " trout-hog " with the most 
elaborate. 

Only, in the name of gentle Izaak himself, let 
him be a complete angler ; and let the man be a 
passionate amateur of all the arts of life, despis- 
ing none of them, and using all of them for his 
soul's good and for the joy of his fellows. If he 
be, so to speak, but a worm-fisherman, — a fol- 
lower of humble occupations, and pledged to un- 
romantic duties, — let him still thrill with the 
pleasures of the true sportsman. To make the 
most of dull hours, to make the best of dull peo- 
ple, to like a poor jest better than none, to wear 
the threadbare coat like a gentleman, to be out- 
voted with a smile, to hitch your wagon to the old 
horse if no star is handy, — this is the wholesome 



164 THE AMATEUR SPIRIT 

philosophy taught by fishing with a worm. The 
fun of it depends upon the heart. There may be 
as much zest in saving as in spending, in working 
for small wages as for great, in avoiding the snap- 
shots of publicity as in being invariably first 
" among those present." But a man should be 
honest. If he catches most of his fish with a worm, 
secures the larger portion of his success by com- 
monplace industry, let him glory in it, for this, 
too, is part of the great game. Yet he ought not 
in that case to pose as a fly-fisherman only, — to 
carry himself as one aware of the immortalizing 
camera, — to pretend that life is easy, if one but 
knows how to drop a fly into the right ripple. For 
life is not easy, after all is said. It is a long 
brook to fish, and it needs a stout heart and a 
wise patience. All the flies there are in the book, 
and all the bait that can be carried in the box, 
are likely to be needed ere the day is over. But, 
like the Psalmist's " river of God," this brook is 
" full of water," and there is plenty of good fish- 
ing to be had in it if one is neither afraid nor 
ashamed of fishing sometimes with a worm. 



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